On the Influence of Vanadium on Air?Hardening Medium Manganese Steels for Sustainable Forging Products

A new alloy for drive-train applications with a significant addition of vanadium is presented. The influence to air-hardening forging steels investigated and discussed. For the investigations, laboratory melt casted forged into rod. mechanical properties microstructure are described compared vanadium-free reference from previous study. component shows high strength hardness in as-forged state (YS: 892 MPa, UTS: 1366 hardness: 430 HV30) distributed equally over full cross-section. In addition, does not decrease during subsequent heat treatments enabling application as material surface such nitriding or plasma nitriding. Although strength, ductility, change expected increasing tempering, toughness acts different than alloys intercritical annealing which hints at interaction fracture mechanism.