High-Stress Abrasion and Impact-Abrasion Testing of Wear Resistant Steels

Abstract

Energy can be saved by enhancing the service life of machinery and by designing lighter units. These design changes enable, for example, lower fuel consumption and larger payloads. The implementation of this kind of solutions, however, requires development of better wear resistant materials. In this study, the wear resistance of a structural steel and three grades of wear resistant steel was evaluated with granite abrasive in tests simulating the conditions in heavy machinery in mining and transportation. Two high-stress abrasion and one impact-abrasion wear testing methods were used. In all tests, higher hardness led to decreased mass loss, but in impact-abrasion the hardness dependence was smaller than in the heavy abrasion tests. This may, however, at least partly result from deformation of softer materials over the sample edges, which is not shown as mass loss. Wear surfaces of structural steel samples exhibited the highest degree of plastic deformation due to their lower hardness and higher ductility compared to the wear resistant steels. On the other hand, in harder materials the scratches were more visible, indicating a change in wear mechanism. Both differences and similarities in the behavior and wear mechanisms of the selected steels were observed in the applied conditions.

Abrasive Wear Properties of Fe-Based Alloys Designed for Mining Applications

“…The RWR coefficient for the steel with a hardness of 400 HB was in the range from 1.3 to 2.6, while for 500 HB it ranged from 1.6 to 3.3. The differences between the results obtained in this study and those presented in [22,23] could be caused by the type of the abrasive material used (the corundum abrasive is characterised by a higher hardness and thus a higher aggressiveness).…”

“…No significant increase in the wear resistance caused by the increase in the hardness was found. In the studies [22,23] three various tribological tests were performed to analyse the impact of hard rock grains on the wear. These tests included the S355 steel and three variants of hard-wearing steel with a hardness of 400 and 500 HB.…”

“…Based on their studies, they proved that when selecting the materials for elements exposed to wear not only the hardness, but first of all the chemical composition and the microstructure were important factors. Wear properties of the hard-wearing hardened steels were further analysed in [22,23].…”

Research methods for the evaluation of the relevance of application oriented laboratory wear tests

“…In the uniaxial crusher tests [5], 4-6.3 mm Sorila granite was crushed with a cylindrical sample (AE36 mm) against the tool steel bottom plate of a rubber cup using the normal force of 53 kN. The granite was replaced automatically after every crushing cycle in the 900 cycle tests.…”

“…In this study, three abrasive and impactabrasive wear test methods were used to study the wear behavior of four steel grades and to simulate the wear in a dumper truck body used to haul minerals in a mine. The wear test results were published earlier [5], but the publication did not include a comparison to the in-service conditions. Moreover, this study serves as an example how the assessment of selected laboratory wear tests' ability to mimic the real wear conditions could be done.…”