Degradation and Protection of Materials from Cavitation Erosion: A Review

The phenomena of cavitation and cavitation erosion affect hydraulic machines, increasing their maintenance costs. Both these phenomena and also the methods of preventing the destruction of materials are presented. The compressive stress in the surface layer created from the implosion of cavitation bubbles depends on the aggressiveness of the cavitation, which in turn depends on the test device and test conditions, and also affects the erosion rate. Comparing the erosion rates of different materials tested using different tests devices, the correlation with material hardness was confirmed. However, no one simple correlation was obtained but rather several were achieved. This indicates that in addition to hardness, cavitation erosion resistance is also affected by other properties, such as ductility, fatigue strength and fracture toughness. Various methods such as plasma nitriding, shot peening, deep rolling and coating deposition used to increase resistance to cavitation erosion by increasing the hardness of the material surface are presented. It is shown that the improvement depends on the substrate, coating material and test conditions, but even using the same materials and test conditions large differences in the improvement can be sometimes gained. Moreover, sometimes a slight change in the manufacturing conditions of the protective layer or coating component can even contribute to a deterioration in resistance compared with the untreated material. Plasma nitriding can improve resistance by even 20 times, but in most cases, the improvement was about two-fold. Shot peening or friction stir processing can improve erosion resistance up to five times. However, such treatment introduces compressive stresses into the surface layer, which reduces corrosion resistance. Testing in a 3.5% NaCl solution showed a deterioration of resistance. Other effective treatments were laser treatment (an improvement from 1.15 times to about 7 times), the deposition of PVD coatings (an improvement of up to 40 times) and HVOF coatings or HVAF coatings (an improvement of up to 6.5 times). It is shown that the ratio of the coating hardness to the hardness of the substrate is also very important, and for a value greater than the threshold value, the improvement in resistance decreases. A thick, hard and brittle coating or alloyed layer may impair the resistance compared to the untreated substrate material.