Tribological and Pitting Behaviors of the Austenitic 316L Stainless Steels With Heterostructure and Fine‐Grained Structure

Heterostructured (HS) and fine‐grained (FG) stainless steels (SSs) show promising potential for use in modern industrial components. In this work, the HS and FG 316L SSs were fabricated by the technique of cold rolling and subsequent annealing. The HS 316L SS was composed of residual deformation structure embedded in nano/ultrafine austenitic grains, while the FG 316L SS was consisted of equiaxed austenitic grains with the mean grain size of ∼2 μm. The tribological behaviors and pitting behaviors were explored for the HS and FG 316L SSs. It showed that the HS 316L SS exhibits better wear resistance than the FG SS under ambient air condition. This was attributed to weakening of adhesive and oxidative behavior for the HS 316L SS. In addition, the pitting behavior of the HS 316L SS in 3.5 wt% NaCl solution at room temperature was also superior to that of the FG 316L SS, which was because of the interrupted propagation of the metastable corrosion pits by the nano/ultrafine austenitic grains. This work will give an important guidance for the future application for the HS and FG 316L SSs.