A novel titanium enhanced plasma nitriding for 42CrMo steel

Abstract

Titanium enhanced plasma nitriding was primarily developed for 42CrMo steel, excellent characteristics of nitriding layer with thinner brittle compound layer, thicker effective hardening layer and higher hardness was obtained by the novel titanium enhanced plasma nitriding. Under the same nitriding parameters of 540 °C × 4 h, the thickness of effective hardening layer was increased from 225 μm to 380 μm; the thickness of brittle compound layer was decreased from 19 μm to 10 μm. More importantly, the surface hardness was significantly increased from 703HV0.05 to 895HV0.05 due to the formation of TiN nitrides. The research can provide new insights into plasma nitriding technology.