The Effect of Microstructure on the Local Wear Behavior of Heat Treated Structural Steel

Abstract

It is known that the friction and wear properties of metals and alloys show a strong correlation with their chemical composition, hardness and microstructure.The aim of this work was to analyse and evaluate the correlations between the microstructure and the wear properties of low alloyed, heat treated structural steel during dry friction. Three kinds of hypoeutectoid structural steel with different microstructure were studied. For experimental purposes, a new type of micro-scale, ball-cratering tribometer and a proper wear-kinetic model based on an ordinary differential equation have been constructed. It was verified that if the process parameters (load, angular speed) are constant, the solution of the wear-kinetic differential equation could be expressed in a simple, closed form. Additionally, it was shown that (i) the heat treated steels have the highest wear resistance if the microstructure consists of only one hard martensitic phase, (ii) in case of microstructures consisting of two different phases (fer rite-pearlite, bainite, and spheroidite) the wear resistance decreases in the following order: bainite, ferrite-pearlite, and spheroidite.