Carbides and grain size quantification methods in high speed steel alloys

High speed steel (HSS) grades are widely used as in highly stressed applications where carbides content promote enhanced mechanical properties together with oxidation and wear resistances. Such a tribological behaviour is mainly due to the presence of primary carbides. It is thus important to quantify the carbide volume fraction in HSS to correlate this result with the mechanical and tribological properties of the materials. Depending of the steel composition several types of carbides are precipitated in HSS: MC (Nb and V-rich), M2C (Mo and W-rich), Cr-rich M7C3 and some others, depending of the chemical composition. Two groups of HSS were analyzed in this study: cast HSS manufactured by centrifugal casting and cladded HSS manufactured by laser cladding. Depending on the chemical composition and the manufacturing process of the studied material, several methods have been used to quantify the carbide volume fraction and the grain size.