Research of Resistance of Selected Materials to Abrasive Wear to Increase the Ploughshare Lifetime

Road maintenance and cleaning in winter are performed with ploughshares. Due to the fact that the layer of snow and ice that is removed from the road surface contains various hard impurities, ploughshares are exposed to high intensity abrasive wear. This article deals with the resistance to abrasive wear of originally used ploughshare materials and the materials that were designed as a suitable modification of the ploughshare to increase its service life. The chemical composition of materials used to manufacture ploughshare components is unknown. For this reason, they were analyzed with an ARL 4460 spectrometer, which was used to analyze the element content. The main part of the research was focused on the abrasion resistance test, which was performed according to the GOST 23.208-79 standard. Based on the chemical analysis, it was found that the basic body of the ploughshare was made of S355J2G3 steel, and the raking blade material was made of 37MnSi5 steel. The original material (steel S355J2G3) of the ploughshare body as a reference standard was compared to steel HARDOX 450. Furthermore, a sample made of the original material of the raking blade (steel 37MnSi5) was used as a reference standard, the properties of which were compared to the newly designed OK 84.58 and UTP 690 hardfacing materials. The parametric test method of statistical hypotheses was also used to process and evaluate the weight losses of the selected materials