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Rotating Bending Fatigue Properties of Case Carburized Steel with Different Fractions of Retained Austenite

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Abstract

Rotating bending fatigue properties of the gear steel 16CrMnH have been investigated after carburized and re-austenitized at different temperatures with 18-30% of retained austenite in the carburized case. It was found that the fatigue life tended to increase from 105 to 107 cycles with the decrease of the stress amplitude in the range of 1200-1000 MPa. The fatigue limits were higher than 1000 MPa, independent of the fraction of retained austenite. The retained austenite in the carburized case did not transform into martensite after fatigue tests, but the hardness in the carburized case was increased presumably as a result of cyclic hardening of retained austenite. The fatigue limits of the carburized specimens were in good agreement with the calculated values based on the case hardness measured after fatigue tests. Observations of the fracture surfaces of the fatigue specimens showed that the fatigue crack initiated at the non-metallic inclusions or the matrix in the carburized case with a depth of no more 0.6 mm from the surface. Thus, a good fitting of S–N curves could be obtained by taking into consideration of the case hardness after cyclic hardening as well as the non-inclusion sizes.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank financial support by National Key Research and Development Program of China under the Project No. 2016YFB0300102.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, People’s Republic of China

    Wu Chen & Kefu Yao

  2. Institute of Special Steel, Central Iron and Steel Research Institute, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaofei He, Wenchao Yu, Jie Shi & Maoqiu Wang

  3. NCS Testing Technology Co. Ltd., Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Wu Chen

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  1. Wu Chen
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Chen, W., He, X., Yu, W. et al. Rotating Bending Fatigue Properties of Case Carburized Steel with Different Fractions of Retained Austenite. J. of Materi Eng and Perform 32, 7960–7968 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11665-022-07683-7

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