Challenges and developments of Hadfield manganese steel castings based on service life

Austenitic Manganese steel has a high toughness, high ductility, high strain hardening capacity and an excellent wear resistance. This grade of steel is mostly used in the mining industry for crushing and loading equipment. The present paper highlights the challenges and the development of high manganese steel casting based on the service life. Currently the challenge faced among others is the rate of work hardening, which is due to the crushing efficiency of the modern jaw and cone crushers. This limits the rate of work hardening produced on the surface of the metal thus resulting in low wear resistance, loss of material and cost of production for secondary and tertiary crushing equipment. Due to this challenge faced, researchers were motivated to come up with innovative ideas and new development that will increase the hardness and wear resistance of the said steel, resulting in longer service life of the components. These developments include the introduction of a new heat treatment procedure, the addition of micro alloying with Chromium and the use of metal matrix composite on manganese steel casting. However, the introduction of these new developments on high manganese steel casting showed to have a direct increase in wear life and hardness of the steel