A study on boronizing of duplex stainless steel

Boronizing is a method to increase the surface hardness of engineering components [1]. This is beneficial especially when the components are always in surface contact with other materials. In this study, boronizing treatment was successfully done on duplex stainless steel (DSS). Two types of DSS with different microstructure were boronized - the as-received DSS and the fine grain DSS. The morphology of boride layer formed on boronized DSS is compact and smooth. The boride layer thickness for both DSS ranged from 9 to 32 mu m. Depending on boronizing time and temperature, the hardness of boronized fine grain DSS is between 1014 HV to 2601 HV. The values are higher than that of the as-received DSS which is between 797 HV to 2311 HV. The result shows that there is a different in hardness of boride layer for two different grain sizes of DSS although the layer thickness formed is about the same in depth.