The wear resistance of highly porous titanium in the tribo-pair with bronze under boundary lubrication condition was investigated. According to analyses of worn surfaces of highly porous titanium, it was shown that the main reason of poor wear resistance were subsurface pores that led to nucleation of micro-cracks in the subsurface layer and thereby intensified fatigue (delamination) wear. For improvement of wear resistance of highly porous titanium, the surface engineering methods, such as deformation (ball burnishing, BB), diffusion (gas nitriding, GN), and their combination—deformation–diffusion treatment (DDT), were considered. It was shown that surface hardening of highly porous titanium by BB, GN, and DDT reduces the weight wear intensity and the friction coefficient of the tribo-pairs by 1.4, 3.5, 4.0 and 1.8, 2.3, 3.2 times, respectively. Such an improvement in the tribological properties of highly porous titanium after surface hardening is explained by changes in the main wear mechanism of the tribo-pairs from adhesive and fatigue to abrasive. The highest wear resistance of highly porous titanium was observed after surface deformation–diffusion treatment, as this treatment provides a combination of the positive effects of both ball burnishing (closing of surface pores) and nitriding (formation of a surface chemically inert and hard nitride layer).

The surface characteristics and friction behaviour of titanium Grade 2 with modified nitride (TiN, Ti₂N) and boride (TiB) compound layers were investigated. It was shown that during non-contact boriding in oxygen-containing medium of titanium, the diffusion processes take place mainly by the interscale mechanism; however, during nitriding, besides the traditional interscale diffusion mechanism, the grain boundary mechanism of diffusion of nitrogen atoms is also realized. The optimal set of surface roughness parameters (height and step parameters, a combination of kurtosis and asymmetry, and profile reference curve parameters) was obtained after boriding. It was determined that the intensity of the adhesive wear of the tribo-pairs with stainless steel and ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene under dry sliding conditions was influenced not only by the hardness but also roughness of the modified surface layer. The lowest friction coefficient was fixed for the TiB compound layer in both tribo-pairs.