Abstract
A precipitation hardening (PH) stainless steel was strengthened by laser solution-aging treatment for investigating the strengthening mechanisms and performances. The results show that, hardened layers with mm level thickness can be obtained by laser solution-aging treatment on 17–4 PH substrate. TEM observation displays that the ϵ-Cu particles are in the size of 2–5 nm and disperse homogeneously in the martensite matrix. The average hardness of the laser hardened composite layer is 423.6 HV which is about 36.6% higher than the substrate. The analysis indicates that the improvements on microhardness can be mainly attributed to the dispersion strengthening of ϵ-Cu precipitate phases. For 4.5 h cavitation erosion tests, the cumulative volume loss of laser hardened sample is only ∼45% of the substrate, which shows well prospect for application.
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