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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter September 6, 2022

Evaluation of the plastic deformation behavior of modified 100Cr6 steels with increased fractions of retained austenite using cyclic indentation tests

  • Pascal Ostermayer

    Pascal Ostermayer, born in 1994, successfully studied mechanical engineering with a focus on automotive engineering at the TU Kaiserslautern and has worked as a Research Assistant since 2019 at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering of the TU Kaiserslautern.

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    , Klaus Burkart , Bastian Blinn , Holger Surm , Brigitte Clausen and Tilmann Beck EMAIL logo
From the journal Materials Testing

Abstract

In highly loaded components, such as roller bearings, early failures may occur due to microstructural defects. Thus, a higher defect tolerance of the material can improve the fatigue lifetime. To produce steels with high defect tolerance, innovative alloying concepts, and a sound knowledge of the influence of heat treatment parameters on the resultant mechanical properties is indispensable. Consequently, two bearing steels based on 100Cr6 with different silicon contents were investigated to achieve relatively high retained austenite (RA) fractions, which are assumed to increase the defect tolerance at cyclic loading. To understand the relation between bainitic heat treatment and mechanical characteristics, the resultant RA fractions, Vickers hardness, microhardness, and cyclic hardening exponent CHT eII, which correlates to defect tolerance of metallic materials, were determined for differently heat-treated conditions. Based on the statistical design of experiments and measurements obtained with X-ray diffraction and cyclic indentation testing, regression calculations were conducted. Pertaining to the results of the regression analyses, the heat treatment parameterizations of these steels were specifically determined for certain desired property combinations within the boundaries investigated. Therefore, the temperatures used in the austenitizing and bainitizing procedures have shown the highest influence on the mechanical characteristics and the RA fraction of both steels.


Corresponding author: Tilmann Beck, Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, TU Kaiserslautern, Gottlieb-Daimler Str. 44, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: BE 2350/14-1 and Cl211-5

About the author

Pascal Ostermayer

Pascal Ostermayer, born in 1994, successfully studied mechanical engineering with a focus on automotive engineering at the TU Kaiserslautern and has worked as a Research Assistant since 2019 at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering of the TU Kaiserslautern.

Acknowledgment

The authors want to thank Professor Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Bleck and Dr.-Ing. Tarek Allam from Steel Institute (IEHK) of RWTH Aachen for their support and collaboration.

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: The authors thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the financial support of the project with the contract numbers BE 2350/14-1 and Cl211-5.

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Published Online: 2022-09-06
Published in Print: 2022-09-27

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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