Research Projects

The financial losses due to wear and tear are a matter of concern for any industrial condition. The life of a component or machine element can be significantly affected by the existing wear environment, nature of the interaction between different participating bodies, and their properties. Most commonly used wear resistance steels have a martensitic or quenched and tempered martensitic microstructure primarily for their very good hardness or strength. However, through a large number of studies over the past two or three decades, it has been proved by numerous researchers that though hardness is an essential parameter in selecting a material for wear applications, some other properties such as the toughness of a material, their work hardening behaviour etc are also equally important. Due to these, apart from traditionally used materials, steels like carbide free bainitic (CFB) steel or quenching and partitioning steel (Q&P), etc., are getting considerable attention for their suitable mixture of hardness and toughness as well as good work hardening response during any mechanical straining. However, the economic losses due to wear related problems are still very high due to the lack of proper understanding and interpretation of the complex nature of wear and its versatility. This project proposal is intended to create a deep knowledge in the field of wear behaviour study of steel comprising a microstructure of carbide free bainite along with some amount of carbon enriched metastable retained austenite (RA). The material will be evaluated under different wear testing procedures by changing other process conditions (load, duration, temperature, nature of wear etc.) for proper structure-property correlation. The study also aims to develop computational model to predict the distribution of stress in the material along with the extent of material loss