Abstract
Titanium carbide-stainless steel cermets exhibit a good combination of wear and corrosion resistance at ambient temperature. Stainless steel alloys have been applied in many industrial applications, with a variety of heat treatment procedures that can further improve performance. The current work studies the effects of heat treatments on a precipitation hardenable steel (grade 17–4 PH), in comparison with a non-heat treatable steel (316L), when used as the ductile binder phase in a cermet structure combined with TiC. Initial comparison was made for the two systems with 30 vol% of the steel phase in both cases. A significant increase in Vickers hardness was observed as a result of a 1150 °C/4 h heat treatment for this system. Moreover, the scratch resistance was significantly improved, with a scratch depth reduced from 1.74 to 0.8 μm under an applied load of 30 N. Based on this work, the feasibility of using a heat treatable binder phase is demonstrated for TiC-based cermets.
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