Hardening of Carbon Steel by Water Impinging Jet Quenching Technique : Differential Cooling of Steel Sheets and Quenching of Cylindrical Bars

Abstract

Austenitization followed by quenching is a well-known conventional heattreating procedure which is widely used on carbon steels with the aim to obtain high strength in as-quenched condition. Such quenching is usually done by immersing a steel product into the cooling medium which provides a uniform cooling of the surface. The cooling rate can be adjusted to a certain degree on a "component" length-scale by using different cooling mediums such as water, oil, polymer solution, etc. However, certain steel products such as beams, pillars in automobile industry or different machinery parts in agriculture require a proper and controllable cooling gradient and thus mechanical property gradient within the product. It is difficult to control the cooling rates locally on the length-scale smaller than the product only by replacing the quenching medium. In addition, quenching by immersing the product into the cooling medium is accompanied by thermal stresses due to the different cooling rates of the surface and the core, and also accompanied by transformation stresses due to the volume change during phase transformations. These stresses may lead to negative effects such as undesired residual stresses or even cracks. Therefore, cooling must be properly optimized and controlled to eliminate these drawbacks. Such a controllable cooling can be performed by several impingements of the water jets onto a hot austenitized surface at certain locations. By controlling the water flow, number of jets, their locations and other parameters, the global and the local cooling rates can be optimized for a specific industrial application later on. This thesis demonstrates the potential and capability of the water Impinging Jet Quenching Technique (IJQT) to provide a flexible and controllable cooling for both differential and for uniform quenching cases. The test rig of IJQT was developed in the University of Gävle and was used to perform quenching experiments in this study: differential cooling of thick sheets and uniform quenching of bars to different depths. Differential cooling was performed on square-shaped carbon steel sheets with thickness of 15 mm, and the uniform quenching with different flow rates was performed on carbon steel cylindrical bars with 100 mm in diameter. Along with the physical experiments, Comsol Multiphysics 5.6 software was used to solve a 1D heat transfer problem to estimate the cooling rate profile along the radius of the bar. The experiments were verified by observations and characterization of the microstructure using light optical microscopy (LOM), and by examining the mechanical properties through tensile tests and hardness measurements. The results of the quenching experiments and verifications showed a high iv potential and flexibility of the IJQT in differential cooling case as well as in the uniform quenching case.