SUBSTITUTION OF COBALT BY INVAR ALLOY IN HARDMETALS
Cemented carbide, WC-Co, SPark Plasma Sintering, Invar alloy, Hardmetal.
Hard metals are widely used in the metalworking industry because they have excellent properties compared to High Speed Tools (HSS), these predecessors of hardmetals. Generally, they are manufactured as a blend of carbide tungsten (WC), hard phase, and Cobalt (Co) (or other metals like Iron (Fe), Nickel (Ni)). However, Cobalt is the most widely used binder because of its good properties, especially wettability. However, this metal brings some dilemmas, high cost and health risks are two of them. In this paper, the alloying agent is an alloy of Fe-36% Ni, which has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, which makes it attractive for applications which involve heat. The samples are processed through the pulsed sintering ("Spark Plasma Sintering – SPS"), which provides rapid sintering and good densification. The properties of hardness, fracture toughness, turning wear resistance and diametral compression strength were analyzed. The samples that presented the highest performance were WC-10% Invar sintered at 1300 ° C, obtaining a hardness of 1992.7 kgf / mm2, fracture toughness KIC of 10.49 MPa.m -1 / 2, turning life around 6 min and modulus of elasticity of 989.49 GPa.