A kinetic description of Vanadium carbide coating formed by the plasma electrolytic method

Abstract

The old creation method of this coating is using salt bath for an approximate time of 6 to 10 hours, which means wasting a lot of time and energy while the formation of this coating with the plasma electrolytic method just takes about 15 minutes and it can increase the efficiency strongly on an industrial scale. In this research, the process has been applied on the samples of 1.2436 steel in different periods. Then, thickness of the coating layers has been measured by using SEM images and thermodynamic data of Vanadium carbide formation. These results have been expanded to access and present a confirmed model to predict the thickness of this diffusion-based coating as a function of time and reaction temperature. The proven model can be used to demonstrate and prove the kinetic advantage of this method and also find the optimal value of applying time and temperature.