Resistance to wear of hot die steel is dependent on its mechanical properties governed by the microstructure. The required properties for given application of hot die steel can be obtained with control the microstructure by heat treatment parameters. In the present paper impact of different heat treatment parameters like austenitizing temperature, tempering time, tempering temperature is studied using response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) to predict sliding wear of H13 hot die steel. After heat treating samples at austenitizing temperature of 1020°C, 1040°C and 1060°C; tempering temperature 540°C, 560°C and 580°C; tempering time 1hour, 2hours and 3hours, experimentation on pin-on-disc tribo-tester is done to measure the sliding wear of H13 die steel. Box-Behnken design is used to develop a regression model and analysis of variance technique is used to verify the adequacy of developed model in case of RSM. Whereas, multi-layer feed-forward backpropagation architecture with input layer, single hidden layer and an output layer is used in ANN. It was found that ANN proves to be a better tool to predict sliding wear with more accuracy. Correlation coefficient R2 of the artificial neural network model is 0.986 compared to R2 of 0.957 for RSM. However, impact of input parameter interactions can only be analysed using response surface method. In addition, sensitivity analysis is done to determine the heat treatment parameter exerting most influence on the wear resistance of H13 hot die steel and it showed that tempering time has maximum influence on wear volume, followed by tempering temperature and austenitizing temperature. The prediction models will help to estimate the variation in die lifetime by finding the amount of wear that will occur during use of hot die steel, if the heat treatment parameters are varied to achieve different properties.
