Abrasive wear of hard faced ground engaging tool

Abstract: Ground engaging tools are very important components of machinery for agricultural applications, such as soil tillage. Ploughshare points serve as the first point of contact between ploughs and the hard minerals in the soil. One of the biggest problems that these tools encounter is abrasive wear, which decreases tillage quality, causes frequent tillage stops, increases fuel consumption of the tractor, and results in soil erosion. During this investigation, wear measurement, surface profiling and microscopic analysis were performed on three share point samples running in silica and granite sand – two points were commercial ones made of steel EN 22MnB5 and hardened. They served as commercial references. A third share point was also a commercial EN 22MnB5 one, but not hardened and laser cladded by a Ni-base + 50% carbide powder mix (Höganäs 1559–40 + 50% 4590). The abrasive wear testing was performed in an especially designed carousel tribometer. The laser cladded sample suffered only 30% of the wear shown in the EN 22MnB5 reference sample running under the same conditions.