Study of boriding surface treatment in the tribological behavior of an AISI 316L stainless steel

AISI 316L stainless steel possesses high tensile and rupture strength at low and high temperatures; therefore, it is employed in several industry fields like manufacturing gas turbine parts, automotive pieces, and prosthetic devices like joints prosthesis. However, the debris and oxide products resulting from wear lead to detrimental performance, particularly in medical applications like partial hip prosthesis, orthopedic screws, or bone plates. This liberation of metallic ions may cause aseptic implant loosening, granuloma formation, and demineralization of bone tissue. On the other hand, research in the last few years has focused on improving the tribological performance of the steel surface, including ceramic coatings and different engineering surface treatments. In this work, the tribological performance of boride layers synthesized on an AISI 316L was studied. As it was mentioned before, the AISI 316L steel is widely used for biomedical applications, so the improvement of their tribological properties is the particular interest in this field. Also, boriding treatment increases the corrosion resistance of the steel due to the boride layers acting as a barrier that reduces the pitting corrosion properly of the stainless steel. For this purpose, diffusional boriding treatments were performed at the following parameters: 850, 950, and 1050 degrees C over 2, 4, and 6 h for each temperature. Surfaces were characterized using scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, micro and nano-hardness testing, and roughness measurements. The tribological response was studied through a ball on disc tribometer under dry-sliding conditions with a distance of 10 km, tracking the coefficient of friction, mass loss, wear rate, and surface damage. All borided conditions decreased the wear rate in comparison with the untreated samples. The differences in wear performance among the borided surfaces were detailed discussed in this paper.