The Potential Impact of Biofield Treatment on Physical, Structural and Mechanical Properties of Stainless Steel Powder

What is it about?

Stainless steel (SS) has gained extensive attention due to its high corrosion resistance, low maintenance, familiar lustre, and superior mechanical properties. In SS, the mechanical properties are closely related with crystal structure, crystallite size, and lattice strain. The aim of present study was to evaluate the effect of biofield treatment on structural, physical and mechanical properties of SS powder. SS (Grade-SUS316L) powder was divided into two parts denoted as control and treatment. The treatment part was received Mr. Trivedi’s biofield treatment. Control and treated SS samples were characterized using particle size analyzer, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. Result showed that biofield treatment has significantly reduced the particle size d10, d50, d90, and d99 (size, below which 10, 50, 90, and 99% particles were present, respectively) of SS powder up to 7.42, 12.93, 30.23, and 41.38% respectively, as compared to control. XRD result showed that the unit cell volume of SS was altered after biofield treatment. Moreover, crystallite size was significantly reduced upto 70% in treated SS as compared to control. The yield strength calculated using Hall-Petch equation, was significantly increased upto 216.5% in treated SS, as compared to control. This could be due to significant reduction of crystallite size in treated SS after biofield treatment. In FT-IR spectra, intensity of the absorption peak at wavenumber 1107 cm-1 (control) attributing to Fe-O-H bond was diminished in case of treated SS. These findings suggest that biofield treatment has substantially altered the structural, physical and mechanical properties of treated SS powder.

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Why is it important?

Stainless steel (SS), invented in the beginning of the 20th century, is known for high resistance to corrosion and staining. It primarily consists of iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), chromium (Cr) and molybdenum (Mo). Based on microstructure, SS is classified into three categories: austenitic, ferritic, and martensitic. The austenitic SS is mainly responsible for corrosion resistance properties and nonmagnetic behaviour. It exist in the form of face centred cubic (FCC) crystal structure with nickel (12-15 wt.%), chromium (16-18 wt.%). Due to high content of Cr, it is suitable for high corrosion resistance applications [1]. Beside this, the superior mechanical properties of austenitic SS is very useful for nuclear fuel clad tubes and fuel assembly [2]. Nano crystalline austenitic SS is mainly consist of large volume fraction of crystallite and crystallite boundaries, which significantly alters their physical and mechanical properties [3]. Further, it is well known fact that the crystallite size of metals are inversely proportional to its yield strength and hardness [4]. Additionally, the mechanical properties of austenitic SS strongly depends on the chemical composition and lattice strain i.e. higher the lattice strain, higher is yield strength. Thus, it is possible to change the mechanical properties of metals by modulating the crystallite size and lattice strain. Currently, in steel industries, mechanical properties of austenitic SS are mainly controlled through various heat treatment process such as annealing, normalizing and quenching etc [5-7]. In heat treatment process, crystallite refinement is strongly required by steel industries in order to increase the strength of material [8]. Furthermore, the heat treatment processes require costly equipment set up and high power supply, to modulate the mechanical properties. Due to this, it becomes important to study an alternative and economically safe approach that could be utilized to modify the physical and structural properties of SS powder. Recently, several researchers have reported that human body functions as macroscopic quantum system [9-13]. The famous Physicist Feyman had explained the scientific aspects behind quantum biology using quantum-electrodynamics and quantum-chromo dynamics [14]. In other words, each quantum system consists of quantum-domains that have some oscillators within, which generate the potential field. Due to this, a human has ability to harness the energy from environment/universe and can transmit into any object (living or non-living) around the Globe. The object(s) always receive the energy and responded into useful way that is called biofield energy. This process is known as biofield treatment. Mr. Trivedi’s biofield treatment has known to alter the characteristics in various things at atomic, molecular and physical level in many fields such as material science [15-22], microbiology [23-25], biotechnology [26,27] and agriculture [28-30]. The biofield treatment has also shown significant results in graphite carbon, for instance, the unit cell volume was decrease by 1% and crystallite size was increased by 100% after treatment [16]. In the present study, we evaluated for the first time, an impact of biofield treatment on physical, structural and mechanical properties SS powder.

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