The Effects of High Temperature Gas Nitriding on Mechanical and Physical Properties of Austenitic Stainless Steel

High nitrogen stainless steels are being considered a new promising class of engineering materials. Theoretically, gas nitriding had improved fatigue life, strength and wear and localized corrosion resistance. In this work, this project is to study the effect of high temperature gas nitriding on the Austenitic Stainless Steel in term of mechanical properties and physical properties such as hardness, tensile strength and microstructure observation. The period of diffusion will be 1 hour, 5 hours and 9 hours respectively. The temperature will be constant in each experiment which is 1200oC.The samples are heated at 1200oC in a tube furnace through which nitrogen gas is allowed to pass. The nitrogen reacts with the steel penetrating the surface to form nitrides. After that, a further study was conducted to study the microstructure, tensile test and hardness before and after the nitriding experiment. The Hardness of the materials was determined using Vickers Hardness with 300g load. The microstructures were examined by means of optical microscopy. The effect of the diffusion time of nitrogen into the stainless steels sample was observed. By increasing the nitrogen diffusion, significantly improve the hardness and tensile strength.