Influence of Nitrogen Ion Implantation on the Structure and Corrosion Resistance of Stainless Steel Substrates Coated with Ni Nanolayer

on implantation is a surface modification technology that produces new materials on the surface by impingement of high energy ions from the ion accelerator. In this work, AISI 304 stainless steels were coated with 90 nm Ni film by electron beam deposition and implanted by a flow of 5×10^17 N+cm^−2 at 400 K with different implantation energies of 10, 20, 30 and 40 keV. The corrosion behavior of prepared samples was tested in 3.5% NaCl solution using potentiodynamic polarization technique. Crystallographic and morphological structure of the samples was analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM), respectively. A clear correlation was achieved between the physical analyses (XRD and SEM) and the potentiodynamic results. The highest corrosion resistance was achieved with a corrosion current density of 0.172 μA cm^-2 in the case of sample which was N+ ion implanted at 20 keV.