Tribological behavior of HVAF-sprayed WC-based coatings with alternative binders

The tribological performance of High Velocity Air-Fuel (HVAF) sprayed WC-based cermet coatings with binders containing no or very limited amount of cobalt was evaluated under dry sliding, erosion, and abrasion wear conditions. The wear and corrosion behaviors of WC-NiMoCrFeCo, WC-FeNiCrMoCu and WC-FeCrAl HVAF sprayed coatings were investigated and compared to standard WC-CoCr coatings as benchmark. Microstructure characterization along with XRD analysis was conducted on all powders as well as the corresponding coatings. Comprehensive post wear analysis was conducted on all coatings subjected to ball-on-disk, gas jet erosion and dry sand-rubber wheel abrasion tests. Moreover, all coatings were exposed to 3.5% (wt./vol.) NaCl aqueous solution to evaluate their corrosion performance through electrochemical testing. XRD results showed negligible phase transformation between the powders and the deposited coatings. The WC-NiMoCrFeCo coating exhibited the best sliding wear and electrochemical corrosion performance, with an average specific wear rate value of 3.1 × 10−8 (mm3·N−1·m−1) and a corrosion current density of 1.9 μA/cm2. This coating also showed comparable abrasive wear resistance to the WC-CoCr coating. Under erosive wear conditions, too, the WC-FeNiCrMoCu and WC-FeCrAl coatings showed a comparable performance to the benchmark. Dominant wear mechanisms for the reference WC-CoCr coating, under sliding wear conditions, were abrasion (deep grooving) and surface fatigue (crack propagation and pitting). On the contrary, no pitting was observed in WC-NiMoCrFeCo and WC-FeCrAl coatings during the sliding wear test. No considerable difference was identified in the wear mechanisms of the different coatings under abrasion and erosion wear conditions. The results highlight the promise of some of the environment friendly binders studied to replace Co.