CORRELATION BETWEEN HEAT-CHECKING RESISTANCE AND IMPACT BENDING ENERGY OF HOT-WORK TOOL STEEL DIN 1.2344.

J. Buckstegge
Edelstahl Witten-Krefeld GMBH Testing Department P.O.B. 10 06 46 D-47706 Krefeld Germany

B. Gehricke
Edelstahl Witten-Krefeld GMBH Research and Development, Customer Service Tool Steel D 58452 Witten Germany

U. Reichel
Edelstahl Witten-Krefeld GMBH Testing Department P.O.B. 10 06 46 D-47706 Krefeld Germany

Abstract

The permanently increasing production of die cast aluminium and magnesium parts is directly related to an increasing demand in premium hot-work tool steels for die casting dies.

861

862

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

One of the major failure modes of the die casting tools is the occurrence of heat checking, a network of cracks on the dies surface, which eventually leads to a repair of the die or in the worst case to premature failure. In order to extend the die life, so-called premium hot-work tool steels have been developed which have to full standards postulated by the die casting industry. Standards such as Chryslers NP 2080 or the Acceptance References of the North American Die Casting Association specify the qualitative design of the hot-work tool steels. Their chemical composition, microstructure, hardness as well as toughness (to be measured in impact bending tests) have to meet given requirements. As no direct relation between the specied characteristics and the actual heat checking resistance has been found so far, this work intends to verify a correlation between impact bending energy and heat checking resistance. This study is based on examinations of hot work tool steel 1.2344 out of different heats. Impact bending tests were conducted in order to describe the materials toughness. The heat checking resistance was determined on a particularly designed device. An indexing wheel transfers the samples to an induction loop heating the samples to the temperature of liquid aluminium before being water quenched. After a specied number of cycles these samples were microscopically studied in order to determine the number and length of the cracks occurred on the surfaces.

Keywords:

Hot work tool steel, die casting, toughness, ductility, impact bending test, thermal fatigue, heat checking resistance

INTRODUCTION
The demand for light metal components is still increasing. In order to produce complicated shapes, the die casting process is the most economic way. The economy of this process is strongly inuenced by the number of components produced out of the according die before failure. The most common failure mode is a network of cracks on the surface of the dies caused by the cyclic heating and cooling of the cavity surface during injection of the liquid material, the cooling and solidifying, the ejection and the spray cooling of the surface. This failure mode, also called heat checking, is besides working condition inuenced by the thermal fatigue behaviour of the die materials. The initiation of thermal shock damage could be explained by the cyclic loading and relief of strain of a material surface undergoing a permanent extension and contraction due to cyclic heating and quenching during the application. A simplied interpretation of this behaviour is given by the

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...863

"Kindbom-Theory" as it can be seen in Fig. 1. [1,2] Theoretically an un-

Figure 1.

Kindbom theory.

clamped surface element extends elastically during heating-up and constricts elastically to its original state after quenching. The theory closer to reality implies that the surface elements are clamped by neighbour ones and can only extend in one direction during heating. The resulting state of stress causes an elastic and in the end a plastic deformation of the clamped surface element. During quenching, the surface element constricts in all directions whereby cracks between the surface elements are induced. The most typical resulting kinds of damage due to thermal shock loading are described in Fig. 1 too. Deformation is the primary stage of thermal shock damage. Cracks are the second stage and they represent the major resulting kind of damage. The nal stage are shellings which normally occur after cracks have extended or grown together. So far formulas describing the thermal fatigue behaviour include properties like: yield strength thermal conductivity

864
Youngs modulus

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

coefcient of thermal expansion The toughness and ductility characteristics of the materials are not considered. During the last two decades material specications for hot work tool steels have been developed with the aim of reaching a better potential for increased live times. The special focus was set on impact bending values obviously describing the toughness behaviour of the material. Due to improved production methods even the highest requirements with regard to toughness (f.e. North American Die Casting Association, General Motors, CNOMO, French automobile producers) can be met, however there was no link so far between those values and heat checking behaviour.

GOAL OF THE INVESTIGATION

To prove a possible correlation between heat checking resistance and toughness behaviour of hot work tool steel 1.2344 corresponding tests were carried out on specimens with constant hardness levels. With reference to the difference of ductility on one hand and toughness on the other hand notched Charpy-V specimens as well as unnotched specimens were checked. The results were compared with the thermal fatigue behaviour of corresponding samples on a fatigue testing stand mainly with temperatures as high as 700 C .

EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE
In order to check the thermal fatigue behaviour a test stand was used which allows to expose rectangular specimens to a cyclic heating and cooling. For this purpose the specimens are mounted on a wheel so that every specimen while rotating runs through a heating and subsequently a cooling device, Fig. 2. With respect to a surface near introduction of the thermal energy the heating takes place by induction with a frequency of 250 kHz. The generator power is 15 kW. To be quenched the specimens dive into a water bath which temperature is kept constant with cooling pipes. Figure 3 shows all important features of the complete device schematically. The generator power is led to the induction loop across an impedance matching device and automatically switched on after the specimen rotated

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...865

Figure 2.

Thermal fatigue testing, set-up for cyclic heating and cooling.

into the heating position. The maximum surface temperature of the specimens is controlled by the programmable switch-on time of the generator. Besides the sequence of the rotation of the specimens as well as the number of thermal cycles can be computer controlled. By means of the programmable leading control also the specimen temperature, the temperature of the water bath and the actual number of cycles can be monitored and stored. If the test stand is equipped with 4 specimens, the quenching time in the water bath necessarily equals the time in the heating position. However due to adjustment of the cooling of the water bath the quenching temperature of the specimens can be varied slightly. Additionally it is possible to uncouple the quenching time from the heating time as long as the test stand is equipped only with two or one specimen with regard to the sample motion prole. Due to the different adjustment of the generator power the heating speed can be varied. With 100 % generator power the heating time from 100 C to 700 C is approximately 3 seconds (Fig. 4). Reducing the generator power to 75 % the heating time increases to 5 s. Further power reduction to 50 respectively 25 % for heating to 700 C increases the heating time to 9 re-

866

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

Figure 3.

Thermal fatigue test system.

spectively 23 seconds. The size of the specimen is 50 55 10 mm3 , see

Figure 4.

Temperature-time-prole for different heating power P.

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...867

Fig. 5. A ne ground surface nish was used to avoid crack initiation due to grinding grooves. The geometric design of the induction loop causes that the electromagnetic energy is transformed into heat only in a certain area of the specimen. The area with the highest specimen temperature can be recognized according to the tempering colours on the surface of the specimen after a small number of thermal cycles (Fig. 6). According to this appearance the highest temperatures develop only in a relatively small specimen area extending to the sample corners. The most homogenious area lies in the middle of the specimen approximately 11 mm below the specimen corner. The metallographic evaluation of the heat checking cracks is carried out in this area. The number of cracks with a length of more than 20 m as well as the summarized length of those cracks allow judgment of the thermal fatigue behaviour. Additional features like variations of the specimen geometry can be used to characterize the heat checking resistance. As test material the hot work tool steel according to DIN Standard 1.2344 ESR produced to meet the NADCA specication was used. Besides the impact bending test specimens, which were cut from the short transverse direction in the core area of bars out of different heats, the specimens for the heat checking test were taken out of the transition area of the same material. Following raw machining the specimens were hardened and tempered twice to a hardness-level of 45 1 HRC. After heat treatment they were ne ground with a surface roughness of 4 m. All specimens where additionally demagnetized and thoroughly cleaned. The examination of the heat checking resistance was performed with 4 specimens on the test wheel. The generator power was set to 80 %. The maximum specimen temperature was adjusted to 700 C . With a constant water bath temperature of 60 C and a dip in depth of the specimen of 20 mm the minimum temperature after quenching reached 105 C . Figure 7 shows the temperature ow in the area of the crack rating over a complete cycle. The heating to 700 C takes 3.5 seconds which corresponds to a temperature changing speed of 150 K/s. During quenching this speed is 170 K/s. One complete temperature cycle takes 18 seconds. This is explained due to the fact, that every specimen runs through two free positions between quenching and next heating. At these positions the surface temperature of the sample rises of approx. 50 C due to heat penetrating form the core to the surface.

868

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

Figure 5.

Specimen for thermal fatigue testing.

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...869

The duration of the test was set to 4000 cycles. Besides the main tested temperature of 700 C some tests were carried out with 650 C . The necessary time to reach the maximum specimen temperature with given generator power was established in pretests. During those tests NiCrNi thermocouples where spot welded onto the evaluation area in order to adjust the temperature in correlation to the induction heating time. For example a lowering of the specimen temperature from 700 C to 650 C for test material 2344 decreases the heating time from 3.5 seconds to 3 seconds (Fig. 8 ). To avoid corrosion on the specimens the closed test vessel was oated with argon. Additionally the pH-value of the water bath was kept at 10,5. Besides the basic pH-value helps to improve the moistening of the specimens during quenching.

RESULTS
The periodic change of tension and compression caused by the temperature changes leads to the typical network of fatigue cracks. Figure 9 shows their appearance after 4000 temperature cycles between 700 C and105 C . The cracks predominantly orientate in the direction of the ground surface nish but also develop transverse to that direction. For the quantitative judgment of the heat checking resistance the elapsed time to the rst occurance of surface cracks would be a suitable but time consuming feature. Therefore the number of cracks and the summarized crack length examined metallographically on the not etched specimen cross section from the area of the maximum temperature were used. Corresponding microscopic photographs of the existing fatigue cracks after 4000 temperature cycles at a specimen temperature of 700 C as well as 650 C for comparison are shown in Fig. 10 . While after the test at 650 C no cracks could be determined the increased temperature of 700 C led to numerous fatigue cracks developing in the direction surface to core. The maximum length of single cracks reaches up to 1 mm, the average crack length measures 0,1 mm. Additional examination of the crack characteristics shows that the crack propagation is intergranular as well as transgranular. The thermal loading of the specimens caused by the temperature cycles leads besides the development of fatigue cracks also to a tempering effect in the surface area. After 4000 cycles at 700 C a low-load hardness check (Vickers 1 g) shows that the hardness in the surface drops to 350 HV1 (Fig.

870

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

11). Towards the specimen core, a rapid hardness increase is measurable over a depth of approx. 2 mm. In deeper areas the loss in hardness is not as rapid anymore and the original hardness of the specimen of 490 HV 1 is reached at a depth of about 4,5 mm. Compared to the maximum temperature of 700 C the specimens heated to 650 C show a remarkable lower loss of hardness in the surface area. The surface hardness of these specimens measures 460 HV 1. Already at a depth of 1 mm the original specimen hardness is reached. In order to judge the results an average out of each specimen set containing four specimens was built. With regard to the repeatability of the results a comparison of the values of every single specimen in one set is of interest. Figure 12 shows a corresponding list for the set containing specimens 10 F to 13 F. While the main results are number of cracks and total length of cracks also the maximum crack length and the average crack length were measured (Fig. 12 ). Apart from specimen 11 F with lower values the number of cracks as well as the total crack length for the remaining 3 specimens show a satisfying scatter of 3 respectively 9 %. Including specimen 11 F the scatter increases to 10 % for the number of cracks and 18 % for the total crack length. Against that the maximum length of the developing cracks is not suitable for quantitative judgments because of the bigger variations of the results. Finally the results of the heat checking tests after 4000 cycles between 700 C and 105 C were compared with the impact bending test results of the same bars (heats). The specimen material was taken out of standard production according to NADCA requirements (North American Die Casting Association). Therefore the impact bending values fall into a relatively narrow band between 170 and 300 Joule for the unnotched samples and 10 to 22 Joule for the Charpy-V-samples. With regard to Fig. 13, no correlation could be found between the impact bending values of the notched samples characterizing the crack propagating speed and the number of fatigue cracks or their total length. Therefore the coefcients of correlation only measure about 0,06 for the number of cracks and 0,28 for the crack length respectively. Also the impact bending values of the unnotched samples, which characterize the ductility of the material, do not show a correlation to the heat checking resistance (Fig. 14). The according coefcients of correlation amount to 0,03 respectively 0,08 for the number of cracks respectively the total crack length.

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...871

To verify the results some specimens were purposely overheated in heat treatment. The material was austenitized with a temperature of 1150 C followed by two time tempering to achieve the typical hardness of 45 HRC. The overheated coarsened structure leads to a loss of toughness and ductility. The according dots are marked specically (Figs. 13 and 14). The impact bending test results of the unnotched samples average on 125 Joule, whereas the notched samples come to 9 Joule. Even the heat checking test results of these specimens dont give an additional hint with regard to a correlation between heat checking resistance and toughness respectively ductility.

CONCLUSION
Heat checking resistance respectively thermal fatigue behaviour is one of the most important features with regard to failures in the eld of die casting. Although there are no standardized tests to check the thermal fatigue behaviour, toughness and ductility values tested in the impact bending test are a part of most worldwide specications for hot work tool steel for die casting dies. The aim of this work was to nd out whether there is a correlation between heat checking test results and toughness characteristics. The set-up for the heat checking test was developed by EWK and permits tests with precise parameters. The tested specimens out of steel grade DIN 1.2344 ESR do not show an inuence of ductility or toughness on the development of thermal fatigue cracks. The results put an other light on the valuation of impact bending strength data as a criterion for the performance of the according hot work tool steel during working operation particularly with regard to heat checking resistance. Obviously this statement is only true for the examined parameters. At least it opens the eld for further investigations of the heat checking characteristics of hot work tool steels and main inuencing factors.

REFERENCES
[1] L. KINDBOM: Warmribildung bei der Temperaturwechselbeanspruchung von Warmarbeitswerkzeugen. Arch. Eisenhttenwes. 35 (1964 ) 8, p. 773 - 780 [2] T. MULLER, Temperaturwechselbestndigkeit von Warmarbeitssthlen und beschichteten Bausthlen. Dr.-Ing. thesis, RWTH Aachen, Germany, 1999

872

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

[3] H. BRIEFS and M. WOLF, Warmarbeitssthle". Verlag Stahleisen Dsseldorf 1975. [4] P. GUMPEL, Deutsche und internationale Normung von Warmarbeitssthlen". Thyssen Edelst. Techn. Ber. 5 (1979) 2, 88 96. [5] Chrysler Corp. Manufacturing Standards. Hot-Work Tool Steel (NP-2080), Rev. April 1975. [6] Stahl-Eisen-Prfblatt SEP 1614 Mikroskopische Prfung von Warmarbeitssthlen / Microscopic Inspection of Hot-work Tool Steels". Verlag Stahleisen mbH, Dsseldorf, Germany, 1996. [7] Premium Quality H-13 Steel Acceptance Criteria for Pressure Die Casting Dies: NADCA nr 207-97. North American Die Casting Association, River Grove, Illinois, USA, 1997. [8] H. BERNS, E. HABERLING and F. WENDL, Einuss des Glhgefges auf die Zhigkeit von Warmarbeitssthlen". Thyssen Edelst. Techn. Ber. 11 (1985) 2, 150 157. [9] P. GUMPEL, Untersuchungen ber Primrcarbide in Warmarbeitssthlen" Thyssen Edelst. Techn. Ber. 9 (1983) 2, 121 123 [10] L.-A. NORSTRM, Ductility and Toughness in Hot-work Die steels: The Importance of Proper test Procedures". Transactions of the NADCA 15th International Die Casting Congress and Exhibition, St. Louis, Mo., 1989, Paper No. G-T89-014 [11] H. JESPERSON, M. KLAUCK and P. ROCHE, Is Impact Testing Improving Die Performance?". Die Casting Engineer, (199), 52-60

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...873

Figure 6. Area of maximum specimen temperature acc. to tempering colours after 20 cycles at 700 C .

Figure 7.

Time-temperature-curve.

874

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

Figure 8.

Temperature in relation to heating time.

Figure 9.

Crack network on the specimen surface after 4000 cycles at 700 C .

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...875

Figure 10.

Cracks after 4000 cycles.

Figure 11. Hardness prole in the cross section (surface-core) of specimen after different temperature loads.

876

6TH INTERNATIONAL TOOLING CONFERENCE

Figure 12. 700 C .

Typical scatter of results in one test set (4 specimens) after 4000 cycles at

Figure 13. Number of cracks / total crack length in relation to impact bending energy after 4000 thermal cycles between 700 C and 105 C (Charpy-V- specimen, s-t-direction, core).

Correlation Between Heat-Checking Resistance and Impact Bending Energy...877

Figure 14. Number of cracks / total crack length in relation to impact bending energy after 4000 thermal cycles between 700 C and 105 C (unnotched specimen, s-t-direction, core).