外文翻译--金属热处理

英文原文

HEAT TREATMENT OF METAL Annealing

The word anneal has been used before to describe heat-treating processes for softening and regaining ductility in connection with cold working of material. It has a similar meaning when used in connection with the heat treating of allotropic materials. The purpose of full annealing is o decrease hardness, increase ductility, and sometimes improve machinability of high carbon steels that might otherwise be difficult to cut. The treatment is also used to relieve stresses,refine grain size, and promote uniformity of structure throughout the material.

Machinability is not always improved by annealing. The word machinability is used to describe several interrelated factors, including the ability of a material to be cut with a good surface finish. Plain low carbon steels, when fully annealed, are soft and relatively weak , offering little resistance to cutting, but udually having sufficient ductility and toughness that acut chip tends to pull and tear the surface from which it is removed, leaving a comparatively poor quality surface, which results in a poor machinability rating.1 For such steels annealing may not be the most suitable treatment. The machinability of many of the higher plain carbon and most of the alloy steels can usually be greatly improyed by annealing, as they are often too hard and strong to be easily cut at any but their softest condition.2 The procedure for annealing hypoeutectoid steel is to heat slowly to approximately 60 above the Ac3 line,3°°to soak for a long enough period that the temperature equalizes throughout the material and homogeneous austenite is formed, and then to allow the steel to cool very slowly by cooling it in the fumace or burying it in lime ot some other insulating material. The slow cooling is easential to the precipitation of the maximum ferrite and the coarsest pearlite to place the steel in its softest, most ductile, and least strained condition.

Normalizing

The purpose of normalizing is somewhat similar to that of annealing with the exceptions that the steel is not reduced to its softest condition and the pearlite is left rather fine instead of coarse. Refinement of grain size, relief of internal stresses, and improvement of

structural uniformity together with recovery of some ductility provide high toughness qualities in normalized steel. The process is frequently used for improvement of machinability and for stress relief to reduce distortion that might occur with partial machining or aging.

The procedure for normalizing is to austenitize by slowly heating to approximately 80°above the Ao3 or Accm3 temperature for hypoeutectoid or hyereutectoid sreels, respectively.

Providing soaking time for the formation of austenite; and cooling slowly in still air, Note that the steels with more carbon than the eutectoid composition are heated abou the Accm instead of the Ac13 used for annealing. The purpose of normalizing is to attempt to dissolve all the cementite during austenitization to eliminate, as far as possible, the settling of hard, brittle iron carbide in the grain boundaries. The desired decomposition products are smallgrained, fine pearlite with a minimum of free ferrite and free cementite1 Spheroidizing

Minimum hardness and maximum ductility of steel can be produced by a process called spheroidizing, which causes the iron carbide to form in small spheres or nodules in a ferrite matrix. In order to start with small grains that spheroidize more readily, the process is usually performed on normalized steel. Several variations ofprocessing are used, but all require the holding of the steel near the A1 temperature {usually slightly below } for a number of hours to allow, the iron carbide to form on its more stable and lower energy state of small, rounded globules.

The main need for the process is to improve the machinability quality of high carbon steel and to pretreat hardened steel to help produce greater structural uniformity after quenching. Because of the lengthy treatment time and therefore rather high cost, spheroidizing is not performed nearly as much as annealing or normalizing.

Hardening of Steel

Most of the heat treatment hardening processes for steel ate based on the production of high percebtages of martensite.The first step,therefore, is that used for most of the other heat-treating processes—treatmentto produce austenite. Hypoeutectoid steels ate heated to approximately 60°above the Ac3 temperature and allowed to soak to obtain temperature uniformity and austenite homogeneity. Hypereutectoid steels ate soaked at about 60°above the Ac1 temperature,which leaves some iron carbide present in the material.