Wear Behavior of an Ultra-High-Strength Eutectoid Steel

Wear behavior of an ultra-high-strength AISI 1080 steel developed through incomplete austenitization-based combined cyclic heat treatment is investigated in comparison with annealed and conventional hardened and tempered conditions against an alumina disk (sliding speed = 1 m s⁻¹) using a pin-on-disk tribometer at a load range of 7.35-14.7 N. On a gross scale, the mechanism of surface damage involves adhesive wear coupled with abrasive wear (microcutting effects in particular) at lower loads. At higher loads, mainly the abrasive wear (both microcutting and microploughing mechanisms) and evolution of adherent oxide are observed. Besides, microhardness of matrix increases with load indicating substantial strain hardening during wear test. The rate of overall wear is found to increase with load. As-received annealed steel with the lowest initial hardness suffers from severe abrasive wear, thereby exhibiting the highest wear loss. Such a severe wear loss is not observed in conventional hardened and tempered and combined cyclic heat treatment conditions. Combined cyclic heat-treated steel exhibits the greatest wear resistance (lowest wear loss) due to its initial high hardness and evolution of hard abrasion-resistant tribolayer during wear test at higher load.