The role of activated nitrogen species on double-folded screen nitriding process

Abstract

As clean and energy saving surface hardening technology, plasma nitriding techniques have been evolved with object of higher performance in the last decades. Even though the diffusion of nitrogen inward to steel is occurred at the final step, solid diffusion from surface, energy transition from gas molecule of nitrogen to atomic or an activated state have many different steps depending on the plasma conditions, parameters and the design of each equipment. And this study made comparative on nitrogen sources transfer with conventional DC plasma nitriding and novel nitriding process using plasma diagnosis and metallurgical observation. With different vacuum pressure, gas ratio and new designed electrode (double-folded screen cathode electrode), it showed a different behavior of DC plasma nitriding including the nano-sized nitride on the outer surface of specimen due to nitrogen source of determining plasma species. In this study, plasma species was able to identify with optical emission spectroscopy (OES) studies. From these observations, we could understand better role of ions or neutral nitrogen species, like neutral nitrogen (N), N2+ and NHx radicals in plasma nitriding process with different parameters. And cutting layers of nitride specimen were showed the results due to a different species gas flow ratio or plasma conditions.