The Effect of Solidification time and Cooling rate on the Ultimate tensile Strength of Grey Cast Iron.

Sammanfattning: Tensile strength modelling is usually done to predict the mechanical properties of lamellargraphite iron considering microstructural features. This work attempts to create a simplifiedmodel incorporating cooling rate and solidification time without considering themicrostructural features. This model will save time and cost in industry with the presence of acommercially available software such as Magmasoft which simulates solidification time andcooling rate. A plate model was designed for this purpose as the test geometry to createvariation in solidification time and cooling rate. By altering fraction solid, thermalconductivity, specific heat capacity in Magmasoft, a good fit was created between simulatedcooling curve and experimental cooling curves. The experimental UTS data of samples fromthree moulds were investigated and a regression model was created using statistics toolMinitab. The effect of solidification time and alloying on the graphite length Lmax was studiedfor twelve samples from each mould. Quantification of the effect of cooling rate and alloyingon the pearlitic properties of grey iron like matrix microhardness, pearlite inter-lamellarspacing was also investigated in this work.The developed model has sixty three percent correlation and explains UTS well in terms ofsolidification time and cooling rate. Microhardness measurements show that there is an almostlinear relationship between the cooling rate and microhardness of the matrix structure.Microhardness data also provides an overview of the pearlite fineness/interlamellar spacing.Analysis of the outliers showed that the presence of free ferrite on a fully pearlitic structurereduces the UTS significantly. Comparison of the regression model obtained from this workwith previous work showed that, there is a reduction in the predicted strength with this model.The effort to identify the reason for this reduction was not successful and needs furtherinvestigation. Pearlite inter-lamellar spacing measurement was not accurate. The relationshipbetween pearlite interlamellar spacing and matrix microhardness needs to be investigated inthe future using a better technique for pearlite spacing measurement. This will be useful tounderstand the effect of cooling rate on pearlite spacing and consequently on the UTS of greycast iron.