12th Tooling Conference & Exhibition - Tooling 2022

The influence of short-time heat treatment on the widely used and commercially available ledeburitic cold work tool steel 1.2379 (X153CrMoV12; AISI D2) was examined in this work. Starting from a soft annealed initial condition, the influence of different austenitizing temperatures and holding times on the metastable microstructural states after heat treatment/hardening was investigated. The experimental implementation of the heat treatment was used in a quenching dilatometer, and a microstructural simulation model was built using these results. As validation of the model, on the one hand, the martensite-start
temperature (MS) was used, measured experimentally by dilatometry. Additionally, the carbide content and distribution, as determined by quantitative image analysis, were compared with the simulated data and used as an indicator of the model accuracy. Through the developed simulation model, arbitrary heat treatment-induced metastable microstructural states can be calculated. As a possible application of this model, we discuss the live-adaption of industrial heat treatment process in dependence on the batch chemical composition.