A comparative analysis of the effect of laser surface treatment on the dry sliding wear behavior of ductile cast irons with different microstructures

Abstract

In this study, the wear behavior of ferritic (GJS 400) and pearlitic (GJS 700) ductile cast iron (DCI) specimens after laser surface hardening were investigated comparatively. In general, multi-pass laser applications are inevitable in a laser surface treatment (LST) applied for surface hardening because the laser spot diameter is quite small compared to the applied surface area. This situation may cause a decrease in wear resistance due to residual stress formation because of the thermal gradient and softening effect due to the overlap ratio. In this study, a single-pass laser surface hardening (LSH) process with a laser pulse area of 20 × 5 mm2 compatible with the laser energy density (6.28 J/mm3) used in the literature, was applied to overcome these limitations. Thus, it is aimed to make it possible to evaluate the comparative analysis more reliably. After LSH processes, hardness values of DCI samples increased approximately 4.3 times compared to untreated ones due to the transformation hardening effect. In the microstructure of the laser-treated pearlitic DCI samples, martensite was present as the dominant phase in addition to a small amount of residual austenite. As for the ferritic DCI samples, the ledeburite and martensite phases were detected. Dry sliding wear tests were performed using different loads (5 N, 10 N) and sliding speeds (10 mm/s, 20 mm/s, 30 mm/s). As a result, the wear volume loss values of laser-treated ferritic and pearlitic DCI samples could be reduced by approximately 26.6% and 30.7%, respectively, compared to untreated ones. The COF values of the untreated samples increased with increasing load, while those of LSHed decreased. Severe plastic deformation and delamination were observed for untreated samples, while mild plastic deformation and micro-grooves were observed for samples with LSHed.