Abstract
AISI 1020 steel substrate is coated with alumina as feedstock material using plasma spraying process in order to correlate the microstructural features with mechanical properties of coating. The present work focuses on the effects of microstructural inhomogeneity on mechanical properties of alumina coating through nanoindentation technique. Young’s modulus and hardness of the alumina coating are analytically evaluated. Indentation stress–strain curves are generated from the experimentally obtained load–displacement curves to characterise the mechanical properties of the coating. The results have shown large variation in hardness and Young’s modulus of alumina due to microstructural inhomogeneity of the coating.
Acknowledgements
The authors would sincerely thank Dr P. P. Bandyopadhyay of Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, India, and the staff and members of the Materials Testing and Manufacturing (MTM) Lab, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, for their involvement in the work. They are thankful to Mr Devesh Tomar (Teritorry manager) of Hindalco Industries Limited (Aditya Birla Group), Delhi, India, who provides us feedstock materials. They are also grateful to the Field-Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM) and Powder X-ray diffraction (P-XRD), Facility equipped at Sophisticated Instrument Centre (SIC), IIT Indore. Financial support from DST-SERB and MHRD are gratefully acknowledged.