Thermodynamical Simulation of Carbon Profiles and Precipitation Evolution during High Temperature Case Hardening

Modern material and process design aim at cost reduction and property improvement simultaneously. As for carburized engineering components the carburisation is a time consuming process, the idea is to shorten the carburising time by increasing the carburising temperature. To avoid any deterioration in steel properties, the ambition is to hinder austenite grain growth by microalloying case hardening steels. Until now, the results revealed in the literature mainly rely on experimental investigations. However, a recent tendency is to model such processes tied to rigorous numerical approaches. In this paper, modelling of the carburising process of microalloyed steels is presented. The simulation focuses on the formation of carbon profiles in heat treated work pieces considering the influence of precipitates.