Investigation of Decarburization in Spring Steel Production Process - Part I: Experiments

Abstract

Decarburization and oxidation have considerable influence on the product properties of spring steels. The investigations in part I of this paper concentrate on the experimental determination of the influence of different thermal cycles on the decarburization process. With the thermo-mechanical simulator Gleeble 1500, the influence of different process parameters, such as the time between furnace reheating and hot rolling, the hot rolling temperature, finish rolling temperature, laying temperature, and the α→γ phase transformation temperature range, is systematically investigated. In part II of this paper [15], numerical simulation techniques are applied to simulate the decarburization behavior under the experimental conditions, which are described in the present part I.