TUNGSTEN CARBIDES COMPOSITES WITH A NON-TOXIC BINTER Fe-Mn
Dariusz Siemiaszko1, Marcin Rosiński, Andrzej Michalski, Michał Rakowski
Quarterly No. 4, 2010 pages 368-373
DOI:
keywords: WC, tungsten carbide, cemented carbides, Fe-Mn, sintering
abstract Tungsten carbides is known for high melting point, high hardness, good thermal and electric conduction and chemical stability at high temperature. In order to limit brittleness which is the most important disadvantage of this material some metal is add to composites with tungsten carbides. Usually it is cobalt or sometimes it is nickel. Both of them are not good for health because many people run a risk of very strong allergic action during a contact with skin and perhaps cobalt increase a risk of lung’s cancer. Additionally a price of cobalt is very high and world reserves is not enough. One of the most interesting material for binder are Fe-Mn alloys. They are not toxic or allergic, they are chip and they have similar properties to cobalt, like: melting temperature, crystal structure and phase transformation on cooling. Fe-Mn alloys have also properties of the damping capacity what could be very important in a cutting tools. In this work tungsten carbides was sintering with a Fe-Mn binder. Firstly iron and manganese powders were milled in a planetary mil. The manganese content of the binder amounted to 13.5% wt. Next WC with 6 and 20% wt. Fe-Mn binder were mixing in a turbula blender for 5 hours. WC-Fe/Mn were sintered using Pulse Plasma Sintering method. In this method the heating is effect of repeated high-current discharges generated by discharging a 300 μF capacitor. Samples were sintered at 1150°C by 1, 5 and 10 min in a vacuum of 5∙10-2 Pa under a load of 60 MPa. The density of sintered samples are increasing with increasing the sintering time from 90% TD after 1 min to 94% TD after 10 min sintering. Hardness of the specimens are very high for the composites with 6% binder and it averages 2800 HV10 after 5 and 10 min, after 1 min it is a little bit lower (2570 HV10). Hardness of the composites with 20% binder are not depend on sintering time and it average about 1800 HV10. SEM study shows that the average grain size of tungsten carbides is about 500 nm what confirm that PPS method is useful to consolidation sub-micron materials. SEM study shows also that the composites with 20% have another microstructure close to edge and in the center. In the center we observed big particles of iron and smaller particles of manganese but close to the specimens edge we observed only manganese particles. Thickness of this layer increase from 0.6 mm after 1 min sintering to about 1 mm after 10 min. It is probably effect of higher temperature in this area during the sintering.