The influence of niobium content and cooling rate on mechanical properties of grey cast iron

Sammanfattning: This project mainly investigated how the niobium(Nb) content influences the microstructure and mechanical properties of grey cast iron. Considering the mechanism, the study also analyzes the relationship between microstructure and mechanical properties. Generally, the work is based on 127 test bars/samples from two cylinder heads and three batches of plates, which were studied by measuring tensile strength, microhardness, graphite size, carbide amount and chemistry. The result data has been evaluated with statistical methods. The experiments mainly included the preparation of the samples for test and analysis. The mechanical properties in this study are evaluated by the tensile strength of the grey cast iron. Meanwhile, various microscopies were applied to observe how niobium and cooling rate influence the microstructure. Finally, from the analysis results, it tells that the niobium does affect the tensile strength of grey cast iron. Higher the niobium content is, higher the tensile strength is. The computed result based on the data also shows niobium’s strong effect. The faster cooling rate will increase the tensile strength and pearlite microhardness of grey cast iron as well. The carbide amount of grey cast iron can be increased by the addition of niobium content. Furthermore, some future work needs to be done to explain the unsolved problem in this result. The reasons of why a specific position A-2-d of plates has high values of tensile strength demand more microstructure investigation. For the niobium influence, more experiments and data containing a larger range of niobium content also need to be done to prove the mathematics results in this report.