Hard Arc-Sprayed Coating with Enhanced Erosion and Abrasion Wear Resistance

Exposed to particle erosion environments, metal-sprayed coatings are damaged by micro-machining and ploughing at low impact angles. The generation and propagation of subsurface lateral cracks at high impacting angles damage single-phase ceramic coatings. Therefore, multicomponent coatings deposited by high-energy processes have been widely used to provide wear protection in most of the applications. As commercial arc- sprayed coatings have been used to a limited extent in applications involving erosion and abrasion wear, developing attractive wear resistant arc-sprayed coatings has been found necessary. A cored wire formulation, referred to as Alpha-1800, has been developed to produce tailored arc-sprayed coatings that are tough enough to resist particle impacts at 90 ° and sufficiently hard to deflect eroding particles at low impact angles. Typical 1 mm-thick coatings composed of ductile and hard phases with Knoop hardness reaching 1800 kg/mm 2 were easily produced by arc spraying the cored wire with air. Coatings were: 1) erosion tested at 25°C and higher temperatures at impact angles of 25° and 90° in a gas-blast erosion rig, 2) slurry erosion tested at impact angles of 25° and 90°, 3) abrasion wear tested using the ASTM G-65 test procedure. Results show that coatings produced with the new cored wire are at least 5 times more erosion resistant and 10 times more abrasion resistant than coatings produced by arc spraying commercial cored wires. The performance of the new arc- sprayed coating can be compared with that of high-energy WC- based coatings. Being thermally stable up to 850 °C, arc-sprayed coatings produced with the new cored wire are attractive for applications in many industrial sectors involving high temperatures.