Abstract
Tillage tools are subject to friction and low-stress abrasive wear processes with the potential deterioration of the desired soil quality, loss of mechanical weed efficacy, and downtime for replacing worn tools. Limited experimental methods exist to quantify investigate the effect of wear-resistance coatings on shape parameters of soil-engaging tools. ASTM standard sand/rubber wheel abrasion and Pin-On-Disk tests are not able to simulate wear characteristics of complex shape of the tillage tools. Even though the tribology of tillage tools can be realistic from field tests, tillage wear tests under field conditions are expensive and often challenging to generate repeatable engineering data due to variable soil conditions in the field. A technique that simulated tillage wear of cultivator sweep in a circular soil bin filled with abrasive gravel medium and moisture condition was developed and applied to quantify the wear characteristics of cultivator sweeps with and without hard-faced edges. The hard-faced cultivator sweep had a cemented carbide chips applied to the bottom cutting edge and front tip sections of a standard cultivator sweep according to a proprietary CADENEdge welding process. The CADENEdge hard-faced sweeps showed improved wear performance 1.7 times and 3.5 times on mass and shape (sweep length and sweep wing cutting width) dimensions, respectively, compared with the un-hardened standard sweep. The results implied hard-faced cultivator sweep with cemented carbide chips provide potential in maintaining tillage productivity and the desired soil quality for seed-bed preparation.
Investigation on wear characteristics of cemented carbide tools in finish turning spherical shells of pure iron
