Nondestructive Characterization of Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Heat Treated H13 Tool Steel Using Magnetic Hysteresis Loop Methodology

ABSTRACT The aim in this article is to evaluate microstructural changes, hardness variations, and wear behavior of H13 hot work tool steel as a function of austenitizing and tempering temperature using nondestructive magnetic hysteresis loop method. To obtain different microstructural characteristics in the H13 specimens, austenitizing and tempering temperatures were varied in the range of 1,050–1,100°C and 200–650°C, respectively. The microstructural features, hardness, and wear loss were characterized using X-ray diffraction/metallographic examinations, hardness measurements, and a pin-on-disk wear tester, respectively. The relations between features obtained from the conventional methods and parameters extracted from the magnetic hysteresis loops were established. Results demonstrate that the proposed nondestructive method is able to assess the wear behavior of the heat treated H13 tool steels. Besides, a standard Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) was trained with a training dataset and then used to estimate the hardness of a given sample with its measured values of magnetic parameters. Experimental results indicate that, if the training dataset has sufficient samples, the proposed method will have a very high accuracy to estimate hardness of the sample, nondestructively.