DIVERSIFYING THE HEAT TREATMENT POSSIBILITIES OF THE HIGH THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY TOOL STEELS FOR NEW TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES OF THE MATERIAL FORMING PROCESSES

摘要

Since their development in 2006, the High Thermal Conductivity Tool Steels HTCS have proven to be very advantageous in many applications of hot material forming processes such as die casting, hot stamping, plastic injection molding, etc. The combination of HTCS tool steels with the emerging additive manufacturing processes and other advanced technologies such as innovative surface treatments, coating and surface lubrications will address many present challenges such as forming thin blanks in hot stamping, or forming big and complex components in plastic injection molding. In line with the possibilities that high thermal conductivity tool steels provide, it became necessary to diversify the heat treatment and make it easy and productive for any type of tools, in particular the geometrically complex and large tools. In this work, a new generation of these high thermal conductivity tool steels HTCS 2xx will be presented. HTCS 2xx can be hardened by aging through the execution of a simple low temperature cycle applied to the material in an easily machinable low hardness state to raise the hardness level to 50 HRc or higher. The deformation during the aging process is very small and homogenous in all directions so that it can easily be taken into account in order to avoid the final machining.