Comprehensive review on improvement in surface properties of bearing steel

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Abstract

This paper presents the review of various techniques used to improve surface properties of bearing steel SAE 51200. The selection of method depends on solubility, adhesion or bond strength between foreign material and the core/substrate material surface. To improve the various tribological properties, the studies of various past and current technologies and also selection of the best treatment for different bearings used under specific service conditions are reviewed in this paper. One important part is material to be deposited and second important part is by which method the material is deposited. Various coating materials used are Titanium Nitride (TiN), Titanium Carbo Nitride (TiCN) and Titanium Aluminium Nitride (TiAlN), Thin chrome-nitride, Diamond-like carbon (DiC), Carbide–chromium–nickel WC– (W, Cr)2C–Ni) coating, Single-layered TiN and a multi- layered (TiN–NbN, TiN–TaN, TiN–CrN) coating. The different processes used are Thermal Spraying (TS), Combustion flame spraying, Physical vapour deposition (PVD), Chemical vapour deposition (CVD), Ion-beam-assisted deposition (IBAD), Reactive mag- neutron sputtering (RMS), Plasma Spraying (PS) are discussed in details. The Rolling contact fatigue life depends on the compressive forces induced in bearing material. Surface modification technology plays an important role in improvement in life of bearing.

Introduction

Bearings are one of the important rotating equipment in the field of tribology. There is wide area of application from household items to vehicles, aerospace etc. Even under ideal installation and working conditions Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) is one of the important types of failure. The surface and subsurface fatigue is related to material configuration, impurities, microstructural changes. The sub surface-initiated fatigue is responsible for failure of bearing. As per application requirements the core material hardness and surface material hardness should be different, the surface hardness should be more. Increase in surface hardness creates the compressive forces which counter act tensile stresses created during working condition. This ultimately improves rolling contact fatigue (RCF) life of bearing. Various researchers are trying to improve on surface properties of bearing steel.

The design of surface layer plays important part in surface engineering. Due to demanding bearing applications the single material alone cannot stand of all of the requirements like, mechanical and thermal. Therefore, now a days with modern materials, modern manufacturing processes and nanotechnology various material combination and deposition methods are proposed. The customized material can give the required solution based on requirements. To create the designed surface layer the process, external material, time, skill should be optimum from costing point of view. Using surface treatment on engineering materials can increase the wear strength, decrease the friction coefficient, and improve corrosion resistance.

Related to coatings authors like Ali, Rodriguez, Scharf et al has studied about TiN and TiC coatings, Diamond like coatings (DLC), Tungsten Disulphide Nanocomposite coating [1], [2]. Variation of case depth is 0.24 µm to 4 µm. In other paper Zeng, Ravindra, Michael revealed the processes like nitrogen plasma immersion, plasma nitriding and various other processes [3], [4]. Enver, Michael, Mustafa, Yuta, Ozbek et al. these are some of the researchers who worked in area of boronising of bearing steels by various methods, powder pack boriding, laser boriding etc. [5], [6]. The boron group are the chemical elements in group 13 of the periodic table of elements. Boron is the element of great interest to various scientists. Case carburizing is also traditional surface treatment given to rolling bearings [7], [8]. The chemical composition of SAE 52100 steel is given in Table 1.

Section snippets

Discussion of various coatings to improve surface properties

The purpose of this paper is to discuss various process details and their effects on bearing surface material.

Various coatings and the related manufacturing processes are discussed in detail below one by one:

Coatings used to improve life of bearing;

Use of coatings Diamond like Coatings (DLC), ALD WS2/ZnF2 nanocomposite coatings [2], MoS2, TiN,TiC coating[9] etc. has bought its attention for rolling bearing steels. Various thickness range coatings i.e., 0.24 to 2.4 µm were produced on

Nitriding

There are three main types, gas, salt bath and plasma nitriding. The various researchers have studied about the nitrogen treatment on various types of steels. In case of bearing steel, plasma nitrogen immersion is discussed in details.

Nitrogen plasma immersion

The plasma immersion ion implantation has the capacity to instigate various elements at concentrations exceeding the solubility limits of conventional elements]. The dopants of multiple types at high ion concentrations can produce alloys in near surface region.

Summary

Even though bearing seems to be small component its engineering is crucial part. Surface engineering is very promising field in case of increasing life of bearing. From various processes discussed in this paper • The surface engineering approach clearly shows that TS process, followed by HIP, provides better diffusion and bonding due to high temperature. This helps improve the RCF life by controlling the residual compressive stresses.

Much work has been done on hard coating materials as compared

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Vrushali Y. Bhalerao: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Sanjay S. Lakade: Conceptualization, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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