Abstract
Hydroturbine blades experience erosive wear during operations due to the presence of silt particles. The hydroturbine blades are fabricated from 16Cr5Ni martensitic stainless steels (16/5MSS). In order to mitigate the erosive wear of blades, heat-treated 16/5MSS (16/5HTT) were liquid nitrided at low temperature of 450 °C (16/5M450) and 500 °C (16/5M500) for 10 h in separate batch process. The cumulative weight loss after slurry erosion test of 16/5M450 is found to be 73% less than that of 16/5HTT, whereas the cumulative weight loss of 16/5M500 is found to be 6.7% more than that of 16/5HTT. The enhanced resistance to slurry erosion of 16/5M450 is attributed to high hardness of expanded martensite (αN-Fe) in the nitrided layer. αN-Fe is formed by diffusion of N in the nitrided 16/5HTT. When nitriding is done at 500 °C, then there is a reduction in resistance to the slurry erosion resistance which is caused by the CrN phase.
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