Preliminary Study of the Rhenium Addition on the Structure and Mechanical Properties of Tungsten Heavy Alloy.

Paweł Skoczylas,Mieczysław Kaczorowski

doi:10.3390/ma14237365

Paweł Skoczylas, Mieczysław Kaczorowski

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ma14237365

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Journal: Materials	Publication Date: Nov 30, 2021
Citations: 5	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Warsaw University of Technology

Abstract

The results of structure and mechanical property investigations of tungsten heavy alloy (THA) with small additions of rhenium powder are presented. The material for the study was prepared using liquid phase sintering (LPS) of mixed and compacted powders in a hydrogen atmosphere. From the specimens, the samples for mechanical testing and structure investigations were prepared. It follows from the results of the microstructure observations and mechanical studies, that the addition of rhenium led to tungsten grain size decreasing and influencing the mechanical properties of W-Ni-Fe-Co base heavy alloy.

Highlights

Tungsten heavy alloys (THA) belong to the group named weight heavy alloys (WHA), which are characterized with very high density and good mechanical properties [1–16]
Because of its radioactivity, depleted uranium (DU) penetrators are successively replaced with tungsten heavy alloys; because of the very high melting point of tungsten (3420 ◦ C), the powder metallurgy (PM) had to be used
It is visible from the graphs that the rhenium content increase causes an almost simultaneous increase of tensile strength (Figure 3a)

Summary

Introduction

Tungsten heavy alloys (THA) belong to the group named weight heavy alloys (WHA), which are characterized with very high density and good mechanical properties [1–16]. One of the special applications is kinetic energy penetrators (KEP) [17–24]. Up to today, these penetrators were commonly made of depleted uranium (DU), which is technologically easier and better from a ballistic point of view (depth of penetration). Because of its radioactivity, DU penetrators are successively replaced with tungsten heavy alloys; because of the very high melting point of tungsten (3420 ◦ C), the powder metallurgy (PM) had to be used. DU penetrators exceed the THA with depth of penetration, which is caused by so-called “self-sharpening” effects of ascribed adiabatic shear bands (ASB) formation [28–33]. ASB forms in THA penetrators (Figure 1), but only occasionally because of specific microstructures consisting of hard

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Conclusion