**6. Conclusion**

Although stainless steels are designed to sustain distinctly superior corrosion resistance in a wide range of aggressive environments, these steels do not show enough wear resistance in many highly demanding tribological conditions, harming performance and service life.

Diffusion-based surface hardening processes are an alternative to increasing the wear resistance of stainless steel without compromising its corrosion properties. Accordingly, different thermochemical solutions of diffusion surface treatment of stainless steels were presented; (i) high-temperature gas nitriding, (ii) lowtemperature plasma or gas nitriding, nitrocarburizing, or carburizing, (iii) duplex treatment combining high and low-temperature nitriding treatments, and (iv) solid-state annealing, to promote surface hardening and maintain or even raise, the corrosion resistance of these materials.

Surface hardening by diffusion thermochemical processes is an efficient strategy to produce tailor-made surfaces with improved mechanical strength and wear resistance, applicable to all classes of stainless steel.

**Author details**

São Paulo, Brazil

**91**

André Paulo Tschiptschin<sup>1</sup>

*Surface Hardening of Stainless Steel*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105036*

provided the original work is properly cited.

\* and Carlos Eduardo Pinedo<sup>2</sup>

2 Heat Tech—Heat Treatment and Surface Engineering Ltd, Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil

1 Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department, University of São Paulo,

\*Address all correspondence to: antschip@usp.br and pinedo@heattech.com.br

© 2022 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*
