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Precipitation hardening, also called age hardening or particle hardening, is a heat treatment technique used to increase the yield strength of malleable materials, including most structural alloys of aluminium, magnesium, nickel, titanium, and some steels, stainless steels, and duplex stainless steel.
Heat treatment provides an efficient way to manipulate the properties of the metal by controlling the rate of diffusion and the rate of cooling within the microstructure. Heat treating is often used to alter the mechanical properties of a metallic alloy, manipulating properties such as the hardness, strength, toughness, ductility, and ...
Very few metals react to heat treatment in the same manner, or to the same extent, that carbon steel does, and carbon-steel heat-treating behavior can vary radically depending on alloying elements. Steel can be softened to a very malleable state through annealing, or it can be hardened to a state as hard and brittle as glass by quenching.
Austempering is heat treatment that is applied to ferrous metals, most notably steel and ductile iron. In steel it produces a bainite microstructure whereas in cast irons it produces a structure of acicular ferrite and high carbon, stabilized austenite known as ausferrite. It is primarily used to improve mechanical properties or reduce ...
Low hydrogen annealing, commonly known as "baking" is a heat treatment in metallurgy for the reduction or elimination of hydrogen in a material to prevent hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen embrittlement is the hydrogen-induced cracking of metals, particularly steel which results in degraded mechanical properties such as plasticity, ductility and ...
This process is mainly suited for low-carbon steel. The material is heated up to a temperature just below the lower critical temperature of steel. Cold-worked steel normally tends to possess increased hardness and decreased ductility, making it difficult to work. Process annealing tends to improve these characteristics.
Differential heat treatment is a method used to alter the properties of various parts of a steel object differently, producing areas that are harder or softer than others. This creates greater toughness in the parts of the object where it is needed, such as the tang or spine of a sword, but produces greater hardness at the edge or other areas ...
Although early ironworkers must have swiftly noticed that processes of cooling could affect the strength and brittleness of iron, and it can be claimed that heat treatment of steel was known in the Old World from the late second millennium BC, [4] it is hard to identify deliberate uses of quenching archaeologically. Moreover, it appears that ...