Determination of specific wear rate of steel coated with tungsten carbide using Taguchi technique for textile applications

Abstract

Textile industry is one of the promising industries in India. Textile machineries have a huge number of components that are subject to wear and tear. Replacement of the components is very expensive and may not produce break even in many cases. Coatings have been widely used on the mechanical components that are being used in the textile machinery. In this work, the wear characteristics of tungsten carbide coated steel specimens have been studied for probable application in the textile industry. For the purpose of coating, different coating techniques have been studied, among that HVOF technique and plasma coating technique have been extensively studied. In this work, plasma coating technique was used to coat the EN 8 steel specimens with tungsten carbide. The coatings were of varying thickness and different stand-off distance of the plasma torch was considered for the coating to see which would be the best coating thickness and the best stand-off distance. Using the pin on disc experimental set up, the specific wear rate was calculated and the friction coefficient was calculated. It was observed that the frictional force and the Co-efficient were the least in the case of the first experiment that is, at 4 in. stand-off distance and 100 µm coating thickness. SEM analysis and XRD analysis were done on the specimens for mechanical characterization and to ensure that the coatings are uniform and also to determine the composition of the coating.