Low-cost, low-energy method for rapidly nitriding titanium.
by Sahib, Seaab I.; Tian, Ryan; Demydov, Dmytro; Broadbent, Nicholas
Titanium nitride (TiN) is a material that's golden in looking, metallic in elec. cond., hard like diamond, and biocompatible for important applications in many industry sectors. To meet the increasing need of such hard coating on Ti-based bioimplant, it is of great importance to find a low-cost, facile, and simple route for nitriding the titanium surface, in order to complement the expensive and user-unfriendly methods such as salt bath nitriding and plasma nitriding. Here we present a low-cost, simple and scalable method for rapidly nitriding the titanium at an elevated temp. in the atm. of ammonium hydroxide. From the Vickers Hardness (Hv) test, the TiN-coated titanium surface hardness was increased by 311.4% in comparison with that of the uncoated titanium. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns have helped us confirm the TiN-coating's crystal structure. In parallel, a numerical approxn. based on revised Newton-Raphson method was used to computationally simulate the material hardness and manufg. cost evaluation for any variable time of heat treatment.