Studies On The Metal Bonded Tungsten Carbide Titanium Carbide Composites Prepared By Arc Plasma Melting

Abstract

Abstract newlineTransition metal carbides have potential industrial applications owing to their superior properties, such as, high melting point, high hardness, low friction coefficient, improved and oxidation resistance. Among them, tungsten carbide (WC) find a host of applications in cutting tools, ballistics, hard face coatings, ball point tips, etc. due to several advantages. It is also used in preparing wear resistant surfaces in tribological applications. But it has some limitation because of having brittle behavior, which necessitates improved mechanical property like ductility, microstructural property such negligible porosity with high toughness to fulfill the criteria for hard facing industrial applications. newlineIn such a backdrop, the present work makes an effort to develop WC based composites adding TiC (0.5-8 wt.%)/Fe(5 wt.%) (titanium carbide/iron) to pure WC. The composites are relatively easy to prepare in the form of casts by suitably adopting 50 kW thermal arc plasma (dc) melting followed by in situ cooling. WC+TiC (0.5-8 wt.%) and WC+TiC (8 wt.%)+Fe (5 wt.%) composites show higher hardness than WC without compromising other mechanical properties. newlineThermal arc plasma melting has been employed to prepare WC-TiC-Fe cast composites in view of the high melting point of WC (2750 oC) - not attainable by any conventional furnace. Besides, arc plasma is cheap and provides a very fast melting method (takes around 10-15 minutes to complete kg scale melting). Thus, production cost of WC-TiC-Fe composites ultimately emerges to reduce (considerably) in arc plasma process compared to induction melting and graphite / tungsten furnace melting. newlineTwo new super strength composites have been produced in this work for the first time. First one, WC + 8 wt.% TiC, exhibits a microhardness of 4210 VHN with Young s modulus of 590 GPa. The second one, WC+ 8 wt.% TiC + 5 wt.% Fe, shows a microhardness of 4380 VHN with Young s modulus of 789 GPa. The typical WC+TiC 8 wt.%+Fe 5 wt.% composite showed significantly high bending strength a