Wear resistance of Ti–6Al–4V alloy treated by means of glow-discharge and furnace treatments

The contemporary glow-discharge oxidising and nitriding treatment has shown to produce modified surface layers with enhanced hardness properties, in comparison with the conventional ion-nitriding process. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the tribological properties of ion-oxinitrided samples and to compare their wear behaviour with the one of furnace oxinitrided and ion-nitrided samples. At low coupling loads (50 N) the wear volumes of the treated samples result small and comparable for all the tested velocities. On the other hand, when high coupling loads are used (100 N), the wear of the ion-nitrided samples is higher than that of the oxinitrided ones, this effect becoming more remarkable as sliding velocity increases; moreover, the ion-oxinitriding treatment allows to achieve lower wear volumes than the ones obtained by means of the furnace oxinitriding process.