Effect of Nitrogen on the Impact Toughness of the Bearing Steel GCr15
In order to explore the influence of the nitrogen concentrations on the impact toughness of the bearing steel GCr15,impact testing has been conducted on the steel samples with variant nitrogen contents (0.1-0.3 wt.%) on the tester JB-30B, and the fracture morphology of the samples after impact was investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical microscopy (OM). The results indicate that the impact toughness of the steel GCr15 with 0.1 wt.% nitrogen exhibits the lowest values with typical quasi-cleavage feature. The steel GCr15 with 0.2 wt.% nitrogen presents the maximum values in impact toughness associated with significant plastic deformation, suggesting ductile nature. The steel with 0.3 wt.% nitrogen presents a quasi-cleavage feature, and micro cracks observed beside the secondary precipitates. The impact toughness values of the steel with 0.3 wt.% nitrogen are higher than that with 0.1 wt.% nitrogen and lower than with 0.2 wt.% nitrogen. The results are valuable for a large-scale bench marked industrial manufacture of the bearing steel GCr15 with the optimized nitrogen concentrations.