Improving mechanical properties of carbon and tool steels via chromizing

ABSTRACT

Steels are commonly used in high-performance demanding applications due to their favourable mechanical properties. Various surface engineering techniques have been developed for steels, among which chromizing is an affordable high-throughput case-hardenig process for improved surface hardness and wear resistance while retaining the substrate ductility and toughness. In this work, tribological testing along with nano- and micro-indentation and morphological and composional characterisation were used to understand the effects of the chromizing process on the AISI 1095 carbon steel, 52100 bearing steel and A2, D2 and M2 tool steels. The results of this study demonstrate that the chromizing treatment of low-cost 1095 and 52100 steels significantly improves their wear and hardness properties to a level comparable to the more costly tool steels. While chromizing also increased the hardness of the tool steels, it had little improvement on the wear resistance for the D2 and M2 tool steels.

KEYWORDS:

• Case chromizing
• steel
• abrasive wear
• nanoindentation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jim Keiser from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oyelayo O. Ajayi and George Fenske from Argonne National Laboratory for their thoughtful comments and insight, Briar Faulkner from Applied Thermal Coatings for conducting chromizing of the steel samples, and Brain Long and Caitlin Duggan from ORNL for sectioning and polishing the samples for morphological and nanoindentation studies. This research was sponsored by the Feedstock Conversion Interface Consortium (FCIC) of the Bioenergy Technologies Office, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, United States Department of Energy (DOE).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author Note

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish, or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: [Grant Number].