Wear behaviour of forging steels with different microstructure during dry sliding

Sliding wear behaviour of two types medium carbon microalloyed steels containing various microstructures was investigated on a 320 mesh SiC paper at a sliding speed of 0.33 m/s with a load of 6 N and sliding duration of 4 min under dry sliding conditions (the sliding distance, 80 m). The experimental results showed that the different microstructures cause a great influence on the wear resistance performance of the steels. Water quenched samples with martensite structure have the highest hardness and wear resistance performance. That is because, water cooled samples contained higher amount of carbon in the solid solution. On the other hand, air or sand cooling from forging temperature results in a decrement of hardness and wear resistance in steel-1 and steel-2. However, air cooled samples showed slightly higher wear resistance than sand cooled samples due to finer grain sizes and the larger pearlite and/or precipitation contributions.