Tribological Behavior of New Martensitic Stainless Steels Using Scratch and Dry Wear Test

This paper focuses on the tribological characterization of new martensitic stainless steels by two different tribological methods (scratch and dry wear tests) and their comparison to the austenitic standard stainless steel AISI 316L. The scratch test allows obtaining critical loads, scratch friction coefficients, scratch hardness and specific scratch wear rate, and the dry wear test to quantify wear volumes. The damage has been studied by ex situ scanning electron microscopy. Wear resistance was related to the hardness and the microstructure of the studied materials, where martensitic stainless steels exhibit higher scratch wear resistance than the austenitic one, but higher hardness of the martensitic alloys did not give better scratch resistance when comparing with themselves. It has been proved it is possible to evaluate the scratch wear resistance of bulk stainless steels using scratch test. The austenitic material presented lower wear volume than the martensitic ones after the dry wear test due to phase transformation and the hardening during sliding.