Erosion Steel: An Analysis Of Austenitic Stainless Steel

1.0 INTRODUCTION: AISI 304L austenitic stainless steel is widely used as engineering materials due to its high strength and good corrosion resistance properties. However, AISI 304L stainless steel undergoes extensive wear and erosion when applied as components in aggressive environments such as petro- chemical and marine atmosphere [1]. Solid particle erosion is defined as the progressive loss of material from a solid surface due to mechanical interaction between the surface and some fluid entrained with solid particles. [2], such erosion leads to degradation of mechanical components and eventually leads to catastrophic failure of the equipment. Factors that affect such slurry wear are flow velocity, impingement angle of the particles, and
Test samples before and after erosion are shown in Figure 3. Erosive wear loss in AISI 304L is found to be higher at oblique angles of impingement. Erosion rates are found to be increasing in a linear manner with increasing jet velocity and standoff distance.
The erosion scar of base material appears to be deep with slight ploughing effect at oblique angles due to comparatively lower hardness, whereas the erosion scar of the specimens appears to be smooth and shallow at near normal impacts due to comparatively higher hardness attained by localized plastic deformation.
3.2 Micro hardness Micro hardness was measured along the erosion scar and it was found that the micro hardness of the eroded area is higher than that of the non-eroded area at near normal angle of impact. The remarkable improvement in hardness and erosion resistance is attributed to the strain hardening of material due to repeated impact of the erodent particles. The micro hardness of the non-eroded area was 245 Hv and that of eroded area was 560 Hv for an average of five readings. The hardness profile of is shown in Fig
Images of erodent before and after impact are shown in Figure 5. It is obvious that the sharp edges of the abrasives before impact shows an angular morphology which have become spherical after impinging on the target. The SEM micrograph of the eroded specimen at 30° impingement angle is shown in Figure 6. The mechanism of erosion at 30° impingement angle is ploughing mechanism which is in accordance to the mechanism as proposed by Hutchings et al (1989) [12] and Finnie et al (1995) [13] at oblique angle of impingement at room temperature for ductile