Influence of Oak Tree Ash onthe Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Medium Carbon Steel

In industrial society, in order to meet the requirements of most manufacturing industries andto comply with the desired engineering applications, the properties of medium carbon steel have to be modified. Heat treatments, under controlled conditions, are one of the techniques employed to alter the mechanical and physical properties of carbon steel. In this study, detailed investigations were made on the optimization of mechanical and microstructure properties of medium carbon steel by using the heat treatment process under control conditions. The experiments were conducted by employing different heat treatment processes including annealing, hardening and tempering in two different quenching media, namely well water and treated water. The tempering process performed for the hardened at three different temperatures (250, 450 and 650°C). In this work, a novel quenching medium, based on mixing the water with the ash of Oak, was used. Following the heat treatments, microstructure and mechanical properties of the treated carbon were investigated via a tensile test machine, Rockwell hardness and optical microscope. The obtained results showed that the tensile strength and hardness values in the well water media were higher than those of the samples quenched in the treated water while ductility of the samples quenched in treated water was increased when hardening process was done at (900°C) and continue to increase at temper temperatures 250°C and then decreased again at 450°C, and 650°C.