Effect of Heat Treatment on Fatigue Characteristics of En8 Steel

Abstract

Fatigue failure is an important factor in most of the engineering applications, especially in steel materials, and among the steel materials, it is an important phenomena in medium carbon steels like EN8, which is very commonly used in components like shaft, gears etc., since it is prone to fatigue failure. Hence, without changing the composition, an attempt is made to enhance the fatigue strength by different heat treatment techniques. In this study, the investigation is carried out on heat treatment of EN8 steel material. Various kinds of heat treatment techniques like quench and temper, normalizing and annealing are performed on EN8 steel. After exposure to the heat treatment, the EN 8 steel material specimens are machined as per the ASTM standards and are subjected to RR MOORE test and SN-curves are plotted from the obtained results; the obtained results from the fatigue tests are further analyzed with the help of ANSYS software. Fatigue life and Factor of Safety (FOS) comparisons for EN 8 steel material is made with the structural steel material and it is found from the comparisons, that the heat treatment process enhances the fatigue strength and endurance limit.