Maraging steels are a class of ultra high strength steels of special importance due to their extremely high mechanical strength and good toughness. In this work, the effects of the solution annealing temperature on the mechanical properties of the maraging 300 steels were evaluated, in order to maximize the toughness without considerable detriment of the mechanical strength. Five solution annealing temperatures were evaluated. The characterization of the mechanical properties was done by tests of Rockwell C hardness, Charpy-V impact toughness, and tensile and fracture toughness in plane strain. The results obtained show that the fracture toughness increases, and the tensile strength decreases with the temperature of the solution annealing. In this way it was possible to find a heat treatment condition in which it was possible to raise about 20% of the toughness with a loss of only 6% in the tensile strength.

Some strategic sectors of the economy require that the raw material of their machines and equipment have mechanical properties that satisfy their use. Maraging steel is a material of great concern since it is necessary to have a high mechanical resistance associated with high fracture toughness. The traditional tests to determine the fracture toughness of this material before use in applications are the Charpy and KIC tests. However, this process is characterized by being exhaustive and requiring specialized and trained professionals. Thus, to reverse this situation, this work proposes a new approach to determine the mechanical properties of maraging steel. For this, initially, the method removes any artifacts present in the image resulting from the mode of acquisition. In sequence, this works tested the method Extended Minimum Transformation (EMT) and mathematical morphology to find these markers of the regions of the dimples. Then, the Adaptive Thresholding, Optimal Global Thresholdusing the Otsu Method and Watershed transformation methods were used to segment the dimples. In the end, the diameter of the dimples and the toughness of the material were calculated. Tests are carried out and compared with the result obtained by specialists using the traditional system to evaluate the proposed approach. The results obtained were satisfactory for the application because the proposed approach presented speed and precision to the conventional methods.