A study for production of amorphous alloys by a flame-spray quenching and for their coating to metal substrates was carried out on iron-nickel based alloys. The spray-quenching equipment consisted basically of a thermal spray gun of oxyacetylene type, a metal substrate like copper, and a flame deflector which was employed to deflect partially downward the flame from the gun and water vapor in the flame and to adequately lower the temperature of the flame and spray stream.
Spray-quenched alloy samples were examined to check the progress of vitrification by X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry. Surface preparation of the substrate face giving proper roughness on it was performed by alumina grit blasting. Tensile adhesion strength of the coating alloy-substrate metal interface was measured by an Instron type-testing machine.
By using the flame deflector as described above, the effectiveness of quenching was greatly increased, and amorphous flakes were easily obtained in quantities in an Fe
39Ni
39Si
10B
12 alloy, relatively difficult to vitrify by the spray-quenching equipment without the flame deflector, as well as in all other alloys studied, i.e. Fe
40Ni
40P
14B
6, Fe
16Ni
64P
14B
6, and Fe
13Ni
64Cr
3P
14B
6 alloys. In the Fe
40Ni
40P
14B
6 and Fe
16Ni
64P
14B
6 alloys, whose amorphous flakes were comparatively easy to prepare, amorphous alloy sheets about 450 μm thick were also fabricated by successive building-up of such amorphous flakes on the substrate without difficulty.
By the aid of the present spray-quenching equipment, the amorphous coating about 450 μm thick of each of the Fe
40Ni
40P
14B
6 and Fe
13Ni
64Cr
3P
14B
6 alloys could be applied to both copper and mild steel substrates. Although tensile adhesion strength of the coating-substrate interface for copper was low, the strength for mild steel was about 10–20 MPa and large enough to be comparable to that of the coating system obtained in the ordinary spray process.
View full abstract