Abrasive Wear of Advanced Engineering Materials

Abstract

The mining and mineral processing industries always suffer serious working environments. Thus, the service life of facilities and parts used in these industries are frequently limited by the harsh environmental erosion and abrasion wear. In the last few decades, Hadfield steels, martensitic steels and white cast irons have been widely used in the ball mill industry. However, the worn-out components and equipment maintenance still cost a significant economic loss due to their relatively low wear resistance. This thesis aims to develop new high-performance Hadfield steel based composite materials reinforced with NbC, especially with the improved wear resistance, which thus can potentially replace the existing Hadfield steel to alter traditional abrasion-grinding media. Further, the dependence of materials’ wear behavior on abrasive particles such as their size was also investigated. The results showed that the newly developed Hadfield steels reinforced with NbC and green steels have clearly high hardness and abrasion wear resistance, with the immense potential for mining and mineral industries where abrasion wear is one of the major failure causes of the equipment/components.