High Speed Steel with Iron Addition Materials Sintered by Spark Plasma Sintering

Attempts were made to describe the effect of the sintering temperature and pure iron powder addition on the properties of high speed steel based materials produced by the spark plasma sintering technique. After sintering, their density, hardness, flexural strength, and tribological properties were determined. The sintered materials were also subjected to microstructural analysis in order to determine the phenomena occurring at the particle contact boundaries during sintering. Based on the analysis of the obtained results, it was found that the mechanical properties and microstructure were mainly influenced by the sintering temperature. Using the temperature of 1000 °C allowed materials with a density close to the theoretical density to be obtained, characterized by a high hardness of about 360 HB and a low wear rate of about 1E-07 g/s.