Micromechanical Characterization of Hard Phases in Tool Steels

摘要

Carbides play an important role in the mechanical response of tool steels, since they dictate the wear resistance and often act as a fracture initiation site, by breaking under the applied stress. Thus, hardness and fracture toughness of carbides must be considered when designing high performance tool steels. However, there is a lack of knowledge in the mechanical behaviour of carbides in tool steels, mainly due to the experimental difficulties associated with their evaluation. Nanoindentation is a suitable technique when testing small regions of a material. In this sense, hardness, elastic modulus and fracture toughness can be readily measured by nanoindentation. Following the above comments, the scope of this paper is to evaluate the mechanical properties of carbides in different cold work tool steels aimed at microstructural design to improve tool performance.