Modeling the relationship between microstructural features and the strength of WC–Co composites

Dry Reciprocating Sliding Friction and Wear Response of WC–Ni Cemented Carbides

“…The Vickers hardness was measured with indentation loads of 10 and 30 kg (Model FV-700, Future-Tech Corp., Tokyo, Japan). The fracture toughness was obtained by the Vickers indentation technique, based on crack length measurements of the radial crack pattern produced by Vickers HV 10 and HV 30 indentations. The K IC values were calculated according to the Shetty formula, which is given by (Eq.…”

“…Despite competition from pure engineering ceramics, WC cemented carbides are widely employed in tribological applications such as cutting tools [3][4][5], metal forming [6], mining [7], drilling [8] and machining [9,10], and even in the domain of aerospace [11,12]. An expanding trend in the development of these materials is grain size refinement towards nanometric scale and more narrow grain size distributions, which is found to result in higher hardness and improved wear resistance [13][14][15][16][17].…”

Fracture and Strength of Hardmetals at Room Temperature

“…Two-dimensional computer simulation by Kim, Massa, and Rohrer (2006) and Kim, Massa, and Rohrer, (2007) uses rather simplistic fracture criteria with arbitrary introduced constant effective surface fracture energy that conceals all the complexity and dependencies of the fracture process, but does not introduce the mechanism that would explain the maximum of TRS. Unosson, Olovsson, and Simonsson (2007) determined that the density distribution of imperfections that decreases exponentially with the imperfection size gives the best fit to the TRS statistical distribution of hardmetals, but they provide no actual calculation or prediction for TRS dependence on the microstructure parameters.…”

The characterization of cemented carbides by automated image analysis

“…A large number of fi elds can be processed to obtain reliable statistical values. [1][2][3][4][5] In analyzing WC-Co samples, the main challenge is to adequately isolate the WC grains. The contrast between WC-WC grains and their boundaries can be very poor and is sometimes nonexistent.…”