Fretting wear behavior of Inconel 718 alloy manufactured by DED and treated by UNSM.

Alloy 718 is commonly used in the maritime and aerospace industries due to its strength and durability, particularly in engine rotating components such as disks, fan blades, and high-pressure compressors. As a new type of 3D printing technology, directed energy deposition (DED) can employ lasers to melt metal powders or wires to fabricate arbitrary-shaped workpieces directly from customized data, thereby making machining more synergistic and intuitive. However, the surface properties of the DED-printed alloy 718 samples, such as surface roughness and wear resistance, are typically subpar. By introducing severe plastic deformation to the near-surface, ultrasonic nanocrystal surface modification (UNSM) can be used as a post-processing method and results in altered properties. The uniaxial tensile test reveals that the UNSM-treated alloy 718 exhibits a higher mechanical property. Moreover, using a fretting test rig in accordance with the cylinder-on-plane agreement, a higher wear resistance for UNSM-treated alloy 718 is observed. This study employs the finite element method to fully comprehend the effect of UNSM on wear performance. The fretting wear process of Inconel 718 alloy is established using an energy-based finite element model. Considering the severe practical scenarios, the Johnson-Cook constitutive model is implemented, with the linear isotropic hardening model capturing the plastic behavior. In comparison to experimental measurements, the finite element results demonstrate unprecedented wear loss consistency with an error of less than 2%. Therefore, we conclude that the finite element model built in this study exhibits a high accuracy and can be used to analyze the effect of UNSM on fretting wear behavior. According to finite element analysis, as the normal load increases, the improvement in wear resistance induced by UNSM decreases. Given that the finite element model is based on the energy method, the effects of coefficient of friction (COF) and wear coefficient modified by UNSM are investigated separately. According to the findings, the UNSM-modified COF and wear coefficient play a significant role in determining the wear characteristics. Due to the removal of a substantial amount of material from the central area of the alloy 718 surface by wear, it is also possible to observe that severe plastic strains are primarily concentrated at the edges of the wear scars.

Mechanical and Tribological Characteristics of Cladded AISI 1045 Carbon Steel.

This study introduces a newly developed cladding device, through printing AISI 1045 carbon steel as single and double layers onto American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) H13 tool steel plate. In this study, the mechanical and tribological characteristics of single and double layers were experimentally investigated. Both layers were polished first and then subjected to ultrasonic nanocrystal surface modification (UNSM) treatment to improve the mechanical and tribological characteristics. Surface roughness, surface hardness and depth profile measurements, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis of the polished and UNSM-treated layers were carried out. After tribological tests, the wear tracks of both layers were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) along with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The surface roughness (Ra and Rz) of the single and double UNSM-treated layers was reduced 74.6% and 85.9% compared to those of both the as-received layers, respectively. In addition, the surface hardness of the single and double layers was dramatically increased, by approximately 23.6% and 23.4% after UNSM treatment, respectively. There was no significant reduction in friction coefficient of both the UNSM-treated layers, but the wear resistance of the single and double UNSM-treated layers was enhanced by approximately 9.4% and 19.3% compared to the single and double polished layers, respectively. It can be concluded that UNSM treatment was capable of improving the mechanical and tribological characteristics of both layers. The newly developed cladding device can be used as an alternative additive manufacturing (AM) method, but efforts and upgrades need to progress in order to increase the productivity of the device and also improve the quality of the layers.