Measuring wear-resistance of AISI 1.7225 steel under various heat treatments: Hydraulic spool valve

Producing mechanical components with long time functioning is a vital issue in the advanced industries. Wear is one of serious difficulties which prevents from achieving desires. The objective of present study is how wear-resistance of a spool valve, which is an important part of hydraulic valves, can be improved. Hence, different heat treatment methods were implemented to harden the surface layer of this component which is an AISI 1.7225 steel. Wear-resistance measurement test coupled with roughness and distortion tests have been performed to run this analysis. Furthermore, a vision measuring microscope was used to investigate the quality of surfaces that impaired by the wear test. As a result of this work, it was revealed that surface hardening methods generally outperformed the bulk hardening process. In particular, carburizing surface hardening method generates the surfaces with ability of high wear-resistance and better surface quality compared to the other heat treatment processes used in this study. Moreover, highest distortion occurred in the spool valve when gas carburizing heat treatment method has been carried out.