Processing and Effect of Heat treatment on Mechanical Properties of Gray Cast Iron

Abstract

Gray cast iron belongs to materials used in production of casted products, which have wide application for different processing industries. Wide spectrum of properties of these materials is given by the structure of base metal matrix , which can be influenced with heat treatment. Generally the ferrous alloys which have carbon contents of more than 2% are treated as cast irons, from this family of cast irons which contains graphite in form of flakes and shows gray fracture are considered to be gray cast iron. Investigations are carried out to study the effect of heat treatment on micro structure and mechanical properties of gray cast iron. This study was carried out to determine a suitable heat treatment process which would give the best of gray cast iron in terms of mechanical properties. The casted gray cast iron product which is used to prepare glass beverage bottles are subjected to hardening and tempering heat treatments followed by oil quenching at elevated temperatures by which the variations obtained are briefly studied. This study reveals that the hardened gray cast iron shown high hardness value as compared to hardened and tempered gray cast iron.