A study of the surface of niobium-base alloy after plastic deformation, nitriding, and double annealing

As a rule, niobium alloys subjected to mechanical or chemical heat treatment are poorly deformable in the process of manufacturing parts from them and have an unsatisfactory thermal stability. A combination of plastic deformation with chemical heat treatment (MCHT) of niobium alloys provides a high thermal stability and increases the strength by a factor of 3–4 while preserving a high ductility. It is interesting to determine the changes in the composition of the surface layers of alloys in different stages of MCHT. The present work describes the properties of specimens of industrial alloy 5VMTs after MCHT with the use of a local three-dimensional method of x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Translated from Metallovedenie i Termicheskaya Obrabotka Metallov, No. 6, pp. 20–21, June, 1997.