Investigation of the alloying elements effect in the flux-cored wire and submerged arc welding flux combination

Abstract

In this study, it was aimed to investigate hardfacing weld metals’ metallurgical and mechanical properties produced by flux-cored wire and submerged arc welding flux combinations. The usage of the combination for these two methods, which are generally preferred separately, distinguishes this research from other similar studies. In the first stage, the optimum production conditions and physical properties of the submerged arc welding fluxes were determined and then flux-cored wire manufacturing details have been defined. Agglomerated submerged arc welding fluxes and seamed type flux-cored welding wires samples were investigated according to the changing carbon, chromium, niobium, and wolfram ratios, while manganese and silicon values were kept constant. Five different samples have been prepared with this purpose, and the hardness test, wear test, microstructure analysis, chemical analysis, and X-Ray diffraction analysis were carried out respectively. It was observed that the increase in hardness affects the wear resistance directly. The effect of chemical analyses on the microstructure has also been determined. Moreover, while the increasing amount of chromium carbide clearly changed the microstructure, and the addition of refractory metals enabled the formation of the eutectic and dendritic structure. The problems of low efficiency in flux-cored wire and inability to alloy in submerged arc welding flux were solved with this method. Therefore, the production of hardfacing consumables via submerged flux-cored arc welding combination method was achieved firstly by using domestic raw materials, and one TUBITAK project and one PhD thesis were successfully finished with these data.