Improved properties of Ti6Al4V by means of nitrogen high temperature plasma based ion implantation

The electrons produced by a low work function (2.1 eV) barium, strontium and calcium oxide cathode help with the start-up of the discharge, with the increase of nitrogen ionization and heating of the samples. The large growth of the treated layer thickness was a result of the thermal diffusion of nitrogen, reaching up to 20 μm, in the total process time lasting only 100 min. Experiments were run by setting a constant substrate temperature during PBII to 800 °C but varying the pulse intensity and the duration of the process. Our results showed improvements of the mechanical and tribological properties, and also higher resistance to corrosion of the samples treated by high temperature PBII.