Wear behavior of cryogenically treated AISI 420 stainless steel

PRIETO, GERMÁN; TUCKART, WALTER ROBERTO

Cartagena

Conferencia; VIII Iberian Conference on Tribology; 2015

Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena

Cryogenic treatments have been employed over the last three decades in both tooland high-alloy steels to improve wear resistance, mainly through the transformationof retained austenite and the precipitation of fine carbides. In this work the wearbehavior of deep cryogenically treated (DCT), low-carbon AISI 420 martensiticstainless steel specimens has been studied with respect to that of conventionallyheat treated (CHT) ones.The tribological properties of the materials were assessed by means of ball-on-disktests, under a range of applied normal loads in a paraffinic aditive-free vaseline bath.The disks were made of AISI 420 stainless steel subjected to two different heattreatments, namely, quenched and annealed (CHT), and quenched, soaked in liquidnitrogen for 2 h and annealed (DCT). A 5 mm tungsten carbide ball was used as thecounterbody. Wear behavior has been characterized by wear volume, frictioncoefficient measurements and analyses of worn surfaces, wear debris andsubsurfaces. It was found that the wear resistance of cryogenically treatedspecimens showed increases ranging from 35% to 39% in comparison to theconventionally treated ones.