Feasibility Study for a Cast Steel Guideline

Abstract: The present work was conducted at Scania CV AB and has as main goal to produce a cast steel guideline. There is a great need to conduct a cast steel guideline, in order to help designers in their process to choose suitable materials and methods to produce lightweight components with higher performance. This work contains information related to mechanical properties, casting processes, castability, machinability, defect characterization, heat treatments, weldability and surface treatments of cast steels. This work was limited to cast steels which could be applied on two specific components of the truck, a bracket which is a structural component of chassis subjected to fatigue and a turbo manifold which is subjected to creep, oxidation, corrosion-, thermal- and mechanical- fatigue. A benchmark search was performed focused on these two components. A characterization of a cast stainless steel turbo manifold prototype was performed in the as-cast state, which included microstructural analyzes and hardness measurements. Besides this initial characterization, a set of heat treatments were conducted, in order to study the possibility to eliminate the initial grain boundary carbides. The main conclusions of this work are that cast steel has potential to be a material choice in many applications due to its wide range of properties. For structural parts, cast steel is advantageous compared with cast iron when for instance welding and high strength combined with high fracture toughness are requirements. For high temperature resistance components, cast steel or more precisely cast stainless steel, is advantageous for service at temperatures >750 ºC,besides its higher price. The annealing heat treatment followed by an aging treatment eliminated most of the grain boundary carbides and increase the hardness through a fine dispersion of carbides in matrix, which can also increase the creep resistance.