The corrosion properties of rf inductively coupled plasma nitrided stainless substrates

Abstract

This paper presents the corrosion properties of rf inductively coupled plasma nitrided stainless steel substrates. A home-made low-frequency rf inductively coupled plasma source was used to perform the nitriding process. The processing parameters were carefully selected after considering the repeatability of the device. A nitrogen plasma operating in the H-mode was used for the nitriding process. Proper substrate biase was also applied during nitriding. Several stainless steel substrates were nitraded at different processing times. Investigations such as microhardness, XRD and EDAX tests were performed on the nitrided samples prior to corrosion testing. For corrosion testing, the electrochemical polarization method was used. In this method, the corrosion resistance properties were successfully characterized. Several results are presented in this paper to reveal the correlation of the nitriding times, the phases formed and surface hardness to the corrosion properties of the samples.