Study on the Wear Behavior of Ultrafine Grained 304L Stainless Steel

Abstract

An ultrafine grained 304L stainless steel with average grain size of 650±100 nm was produced by a combination of cold rolling and annealing. Wear behavior of the steel was examined by dry sliding wear tests under different loads. Different microstructural characterizations were conducted on the ultrafine grained structure after thermomechanical processing and wear tests. The results demonstrated that the steel had yield strength of 720 MPa and total elongation of 47%, which is almost twice higher than typical coarse grained strength. Also, wear tests results showed a good linear relation between the cumulative wear loss and distance in each normal load. Wear rate was about 0.024, 0.043 and 0.093 mg/m for normal loads of 10, 20 and 30N, respectively. Wear mechanism was also recognized as delamination (in the early stage) and mixture of delamination and abrasion in higher distances.