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Tempering is a process of heat treating, which is used to increase the toughness of iron-based alloys. Tempering is usually performed after hardening, to reduce some of the excess hardness, and is done by heating the metal to some temperature below the critical point for a certain period of time, then allowing it to cool in still air. The exact ...
Heat treatment techniques include annealing, case hardening, precipitation strengthening, tempering, carburizing, normalizing and quenching. Although the term heat treatment applies only to processes where the heating and cooling are done for the specific purpose of altering properties intentionally, heating and cooling often occur incidentally ...
The high temperature of annealing may result in oxidation of the metal's surface, resulting in scale. If scale must be avoided, annealing is carried out in a special atmosphere, such as with endothermic gas (a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen gas, and nitrogen gas). Annealing is also done in forming gas, a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen.
As with conventional quench and tempering the material being heat treated must be cooled from the austenitizing temperature quickly enough to avoid the formation of pearlite. The specific cooling rate that is necessary to avoid the formation of pearlite is a product of the chemistry of the austenite phase and thus the alloy being processed.
The term hardened steel is often used for a medium or high carbon steel that has been given heat treatment and then quenching followed by tempering. The quenching results in the formation of metastable martensite, the fraction of which is reduced to the desired amount during tempering. This is the most common state for finished articles such as ...
Differential tempering begins by taking steel that has been uniformly quenched and hardened, and then heating it in localized areas to reduce the hardness. The process is often used in blacksmithing for tempering cutting instruments, softening the back, shaft, or spine, but simultaneously tempering the edge to a very high hardness. The process ...
Equipment. Consolidated Engineering Company Archived 2013-11-05 at the Wayback Machine Annealing furnaces cover a broad range of Steel and Aluminum applications including tempering, normalizing, and aging, and similar automated loading, unloading and natural or forced cooling is possible with roller hearth, tip-up or batch arrangements.
However, precipitates of chromium, copper, or other elements can strengthen the steel by similar amounts in comparison to hardening and tempering. The strength can be tailored by adjusting the annealing process, with lower initial temperatures resulting in higher strengths. The lower initial temperatures increase the driving force of nucleation.