Control Factors on the Heat Treatment Process Applied to A537 Steel for Increasing Hardness Using Hardening and Tempering

The paper is based on laboratory experiments of heat treatments applied to samples of A537/A537M steel. The work continues other previous works aimed at modifying structures and properties of this steel, including through surface treatments. The experiments were performed using Taguchi methods from Quality Engineering. A number of four factors were selected as influencing the structure after heat treatment: heating temperature for hardening, cooling rate on hardening, time and tempering temperature. A number of nine experiments were performed using an L9 orthogonal matrix. Objective function was changed to maximum hardness after the heat treatment regime. The results show that the tempering temperature has the greatest influence on the final hardness of the A537 steel samples.