Influence of hardfacings on wear behavior of EN-42A steel in actual field conditions

ABSTRACT

In agriculture, the wear significantly influences the working edges of the ploughshare blades. So any improvement in the life of the tillage tools will be of great significance. In the present work EN-42A steel, ploughshare blades were hardfaced by three different iron-based hardfacing alloys, designated as H1, H2, and H3 using manual metal arc welding technique with an aim to improve the abrasive wear behaviour of ploughshare blades. The full edge (120 mm) and half-edge (60 mm) of the ploughshare were overlaid in order to examine the influence of the overlaid area. The study reveals the bare EN-42A steel experienced maximum weight loss (103 g), indicating low abrasive wear resistance due to its soft ferritic and pearlitic structure. Hardfacings were found to be protective against abrasive wear, and H1 hardfacing has shown minimum weight loss (71 g), followed by H2 (84 g) and H3 (86 g) hardfacing. Wear rate indices (WRI) for H1, H2, and H3 hardfaced steel are found to be 1.45, 1.22, and 1.19, respectively. Better behaviour of H1 hardfacing is attributed to its high hardness, and presence of complex nanocarbides in the metal matrix. Full-edge hardfaced ploughshare blades indicated better abrasive wear resistance than the half-edge hardfaced blades.

KEYWORDS:

• Hardfacing
• wear
• ploughshare blade
• hardness
• microstructure
• ploughing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).