Boron hardenable steel for longer-life tillage equipment
Cost-effective, durable, and tough, Boron grades significantly reduce steel hardening costs for moldboard plows, disc harrows, and cultivators — while increasing hardness and toughness. They are compelling replacements for carburized, triple-layered cladding, B27/B30, and high alloy tool steels for tillage implements.
The challenges with carburizing, triple-layer cladding, or high-alloy tool steels to harden tillage equipment
Carburizing: Case hardening, such as carburizing, is widely used to create tillage equipment with high surface hardness. But carburizing has several limitations: it’s an expensive process, time consuming (12 to 24 hours and in some cases even longer), dealing with hazardous chemicals/waste, and its energy consumption and carbon emissions. Plus, carburized steel has only moderate toughness and can suffer from quench cracks.
Triple-layer cladding: This hardening method has a much faster processing time than carburizing and delivers good surface hardness – but low toughness. Triple-layer cladding is also expensive and the resulting hardened steel is challenging to process (drill, cut, etc.) in the workshop.
High-alloy tool steels: Unlike carburized or triple-clad steel, high-alloy tool steel delivers through-thickness hardness – a major advantage. However, high-alloy tool steels are expensive, have low toughness, are afflicted by quench cracks, and require special workshop processing procedures.
It is important for a mould board to be high hard as well as tough enough to take the impact load when the plow hits stones.
In the workshop, the material needs to have good properties to drill, cut and heat treat without quench cracks. Keeping these in mind SSAB has designed a novel hardenable steel.