Study on Corrosion Behavior of Heat Treated High Carbon Low Alloy Steel

Abstract India is a developing country where agriculture acts as a major contributor about 27.4% to the gross domestic product (GDP), and accounts for about 18% share, of total value of country’s export. In the recent days, there is a remarkable change in production of agricultural tools of different kind which are used accessories in farming. Most often farming tools are made of high strength low alloy steel such as EN42 grade steel has been selected for present investigation for it’s wide availability. Wear resistance is one of the major mechanical factors for ploughing. But, role of corrosion cannot be minimized being it is directly related to surface deterioration phenomena. So, heat treatment is considered to one of the ways to mitigate corrosion issue and keeping wear resistance as major requirement, Presence of morphological variation due to heat treatment becoming the source for studying pitting potential corrosion. Annealing, normalizing, hardening of base metal has been conducted for selected grade of steel and systematically examined for hardness and determining pitting potential of heat treated sample. Among all the samples, annealed sample exhibited low hardness and it may be accounted to reliving of internal stresses of received rolled but exhibited higher corrosion resistance. While as, hardened steel has shown higher hardness and less corrosion resistance. It is attributed to existence of marten site and chances of more prone to inter granular corrosion. As, the present investigate aims at studying corrosion behavior of heat treated steel, it is recommended to practice normalizing from both the requirements of corrosion and wear resistance.