Dry friction and wear behavior of volcano arrays based mixed morphology textured by femtosecond laser

Titanium alloys have gained increasing attention in aerospace, marine and biomedical industries owing to their high strength-to-weight ratio, high temperature resistance, excellent corrosion resistance and good biocompatibility. However, the poor tribological properties have severely restricted their applications. Currently, laser surface texturing can be used to improve the friction and wear performances of metallic materials. In this study, large area Ti6Al4V multiscale volcano arrays were realized by femtosecond laser direct writing and helped to decrease the friction coefficient and wear rate. Moreover, the impact of varied texture pattern on tribology performance were carefully studied. The reciprocal sliding tribological tests demonstrate that the Ti6Al4V volcano arrays based on Grid-lines texturing pattern showed lowest average friction coefficient and smallest wear loss at the end of friction testing. The significantly improved tribology performance could be attributed to the mixed morphology of Ti6Al4V volcano arrays based Grid-lines pattern on the surface induced by femtosecond laser. This study demonstrate a straightforward approach to improve tribological performance of titanium alloys.