Correlation between surface textural parameter and tribological behaviour of four metal materials with laser surface texturing (LST)

Laser processing technology was used to fabricate dimple-shaped surface textures on four metal materials (316 SS, NiTi, TA2, and Ti6Al4V). A Taguchi L16 (22 × 42) orthogonal array design was used to determine the correlation between the textural parameters and dry sliding tribological behaviour of the four metal materials. Furthermore, the validity of the optimized textural parameters was determined under oil lubrication conditions. The influencing parameters were texture density, material type, type of counterpart and applied load. The output result of the mass loss was converted into a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) for the analysis of the optimal parameter combination. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to determine the significance of the four factors. The results of the S/N analysis and the ANOVA indicated that the influence degrees of the factors on mass loss were in the following order: material type > type of counterpart > texture density > applied load. For the 316 SS, NiTi, TA2 and Ti6Al4V, the optimal texture densities were 5%, 7%, 5%, and 11%, respectively. According to the observation of the wear morphology, it was found that the surface texturing played a positive role in improving the wear resistance of the selected material, especially under oil lubrication conditions.