Abstract. Using core wires with Ti-B4C-C as core and Al as strip materials, Ti(C,N)-TiB2-Al2O3 composite ceramic coatings were prepared on 45 steel substrates by the reactive arc spray technology. The influence of spray voltage, current, gas pressure and distance on the coatings was discussed. The spray parameters were optimized with porosity of the coatings as evaluation standard. The results showed that the most important factor which influences the quality of the coatings was spray distance. Then spray gas pressure, current and voltage followed in turn. The optimum process was spray current of 120A, voltage of 36, gas pressure of 0.7MPa and distance of 160mm. The porosity of coatings prepared in this spray process was only 2.11%. The coatings were composed of TiB2, TiC0.3N0.7, TiN, Al2O3 and AlN. Good properties and uniform distribution of these ceramic phases made the coatings have excellent comprehensive performances.
IntroductionCeramics have virtues of high strength, good wear-and corrosion-resistance. That's why they are regarded as favorable structural or coating materials of components working on rigorous service conditions. However, the inherent fragility of ceramics restricts their applications. Toughening ceramics becomes a cosmopolitan difficult problem. Researches indicated that composite ceramics composed of some single-phased ceramics with good physical and chemical compatibility have higher toughness than the single-phased ceramics, and the toughness of ternary ceramics (such as TiB2-TiCAl2O3, TiB2-TiC-Al2O3-SiC et al) is higher than that of the binary ceramics (such as TiB2-TiC, TiB2-Al2O3, TiC-Al2O3, Al2O3-SiC et al) [1][2][3][4][5]. Among them, TiB2-TiC, TiB2-Ti(C,N) and TiB2-TiC-Al2O3 were widely investigated as coating materials [6,7]. They were widely reported to be prepared by reactive flame spray, argon arc cladding, lazer cladding, electro-thermal explosion spray and reactive plasma spray, whereas seldom reported to be prepared by arc spray technology [2,3,[8][9][10][11].As well known, the arc spray technology is mainly used to prepare metal coatings, or ceramic grains strengthening metal-based composite coatings, whose main composition is still metals, but hard to prepare entire ceramic coatings. This paper developed a new ceramic coating preparation method of reactive arc spray (abbr. RAS) by combining self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (abbr. SHS) with arc spray. Ti(C,N)-TiB2 -Al2O3 composite ceramic coatings were prepared on the surface of 45 steel by RAS with core wires with Ti-B4C-C as core and Al as strip materials. The influence of spray