The Effect of Thermo-mechanical Treatment of Substrate Preparation and Carburizing Temperature on The Morphology and Hardness of Carburizing on Low Carbon Steel

Low carbon steel has a lot of applications in daily life because of its excellent properties. Among its excellent properties are good ductility, toughness, formability, and weldability. For the case of application that requires good wear resistant, carbon steel is not sufficient. For this case it is required to increase the hardness of carbon steel, such as by carburizing method. In this method one factor that affects the carburizing layer is metal substrate condition, i.e grain size. Another factor is temperature that could have significant role on the carburized layer characteristics. Therefore the present works focus in the correlation between degree of reduction of cold rolling and carburizing temperature on the carburized layer characteristic. Thermo-mechanical treatment was applied to the specimen with reduction of 0%, 30%, and 80% by mean of rolling before carburizing process. Carburizing processes were carried out at temperature of 850°C, 900°C, and 950°C. Examinations on carburized specimens were conducted by metallography and micro hardness test. The result showed that the specimen of 80% reduction giving the thickest layer and the hardest surface layer. In addition, at temperature of 900°C, the hardest layer was formed with the hardness at 1003 HV. However, the thickest layer was formed at the temperature of 950°C.