High-stress abrasive wear of honeycomb-architecture TiCp/H13 steel composites

Abstract In this study, a honeycomb-architecture TiCp/H13 steel composite was developed to address the wear in mining machinery components. The composite was fabricated using H13 steel (4Cr5MoSiV1) as the matrix and a TiC ceramic preform as the reinforcement skeleton via a squeeze casting infiltration process. The composite was designed with composite-region volume fractions of 35, 50, and 65 vol%. The TiCp content within the composite region was independently set at 35, 50, and 65 vol%. The wear performance of these composites under high-stress conditions was systematically investigated using a steel wheel-quartz sand-specimen tribological pair, with an applied load of 100 N. The results show that the wear resistance of the composite increased with increasing TiCp content and composite-region volume fraction. The hard-phase TiCp effectively impedes abrasive cutting. A composite with 65 vol% TiCp and a 65 vol% composite-region fraction achieved the best performance, with a relative wear resistance 6.87 times that of the matrix steel.