| Commercially pure titanium (CP-Ti) and its alloy, Ti-6Al-4V, have found widespread use in aerospace, mechanical and biomedical industries due to their high strength to weight ratio, high stiffness, excellent corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. Although these materials provide significant engineering performance, problems such as galling, seizing and poor wear resistance have limited their use. One way of achieving increased wear performance is by modifying their surface properties by deposition of a suitable coating via solid-state diffusion. Hence, this research has been undertaken with the objective of developing a powder-based process for depositing a thick double-layer boride (TiB2 + TiB) coating on Ti-6Al-4V and CP-Ti and a simple solid-state diffusion model to predict the growth kinetics of TiB2 and TiB layers of the coating, based on processing parameters.; The powder composition that resulted in maximum double-layer thickness with clean surface finish was found to be: Composition A (where, A = powder mixture of boron source, transport medium and scavenger). Boriding experiments were conducted in the temperature range 950-1200°C on Ti-6Al-4V and 850-1050°C on CP-Ti samples for time periods studied ranging from 3 to 24 hours at different temperatures. The growth kinetics of TiB2 and total (TiB2 + TiB) layers seem to be parabolic. The layer growth kinetics of TiB was found to be nonparabolic. TiB whiskers had different morphologies at temperatures above and below the beta-transus temperatures of Ti-6Al-4V and CP-Ti. For both materials, typically, TiB whiskers were thin below the beta-transus temperature and thicker above it.; The theoretical model seems to show good agreement with the experimental data of TiB2 thicknesses on CP-Ti at all the temperatures studied. For total (TiB2 + TiB) coating thicknesses, the model showed good agreement with experimental data at all temperatures, except 1050°C. In case of Ti-6Al-4V, the model showed good agreement with TiB2 and total (TiB2 + TiB) coating thicknesses at 950°C, below the beta-transus temperature. Above beta-transus (985 +/- 2°C), there was some discrepancy in the theoretically calculated and experimental thicknesses. This was attributed to TiB whisker thickening above beta transus and concurrent reduction in the areal density of TiB whiskers. |
