Production of CoCrFeNi(Al/Ti) High-Entropy Alloys by Mechanical Alloying: Optimization of Milling Time and Comparison of Corrosion Susceptibilities

CoCrFeNi alloy is the most well-known four-component equiatomic alloy. In addition, it has a low-cost composition among HEAs. Four-component alloys are considered semi-HEAs. Therefore, a five-component HEA design was made by adding another metal to the main composition of CoCrFeNi. As the fifth metal, two metals such as Al and Ti, which are relatively low in cost and have the potential to improve properties, were chosen. For this purpose, in this study, the effect of Al and Ti on CoCrFeNi main alloy was investigated by producing three different samples as CoCrFeNi, CoCrFeNiAl, and CoCrFeNiTi. The alloys with three different compositions (used three different samples) were successfully produced by the mechanical alloying method. Although Al and Ti have the possibility of intermetallic with other metals in the alloy, such a formation was not observed during mechanical alloying, and it was observed that all metals were homogeneously distributed in the alloy. The microhardness results indicated that CoCrFeNiAl and CoCrFeNiTi samples had similar hardness values. While the hardness of the CoCrFeNi sample was 136 HV, the hardness of the CoCrFeNiAl sample was 262 HV. However, the hardness of the CoCrFeNiTi sample decreased significantly. The hardness of the CoCrFeNiTi sample was measured as 269 HV. It was observed that the addition of Ti and Al to the base alloy was increased a significant change in hardness. It has been observed that Ti supplementation has a more positive effect on improving corrosion properties. It is seen that the corrosion potentials shift toward more negative potentials with the addition of Al and Ti to the CoCrFeNi (−194 mV) alloy (−306 and −224 mV for CoCrFeNiAl and CoCrFeNiTi, respectively). When the surface morphologies of the alloys are compared after corrosion; the damage to the alloy surfaces increases due to the negative Ecorr value in CoCrFeNiAl and CoCrFeNiTi alloys compared to the master alloy. However, the high corrosion current density (12.69 µA/cm2) in the CoCrFeNiTi sample caused much more damage to this alloy. Graphical Abstract: (Figure presented.)