The resistance of steels to abrasion by sand

Abstract

A study has been made of the adaptability of three tyes of apparatus, namely, the ball-mill, the sand blast, and the Brinell machine, to the testing of the resistance of metals to abrasion. A detailed description of all apparatus used is given. The ball mill was generally unsatisfactory; the sand blast gave consistent results but did not differentiate between the materials tested, apparently because of the fact that the abrading conditions were not sufficiently severe; but the Brinell machine proved to be generally satisfactory. The Brinell test showed that the resistance to wear of normalized, annealed, hardened, or tempered carbon steels increases with their hardness. Increasing the temperature of annealing resulted in a slight increase in resistance to wear, the increase being more marked in a low-carbon than in a high-carbon steel. Abrasion in this type of test is caused by the gradual breaking up of the individual grains and not by the removal of separate grains in their entirety, and this action is accompanied by local strain hardening.