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Recently, a report was issued describing the use of an alternative to the commonly used thermocouple-probe assemblies for gathering time-temperature data to simulate microstructure, hardness and residual stresses of large castings of crack-sensitive steel alloys. This process involves the measurement of the increase of the water temperature in the quenching tank as a function of time as if the quench tank were a macro-calorimeter. From this data, cooling curves may be calculated which are then used to predict microstructure and hardness. However, no details of the actual modeling process used in that work have been published to date. This paper describes the results of a laboratory study which was recently performed using a round AISI 4140 steel bar to evaluate the feasibility of using water temperature rise during a quenching to generate a cooling curve for property prediction by simulation in a manner similar to that reported earlier.

This paper describes the use of computational simulation to examine the heat transfer properties and resulting residual stress obtained by quenching a standard probe into various quench oils. Cooling curves (time-temperature profiles) were obtained after immersing a preheated 12.5 mm dia. × 60 mm cylindrical Inconel 600 (Wolfson) probe with a Type K thermocouple inserted into the geometric center into a mineral oil quenchant. Different quenching conditions were used, as received (“fresh”) and after oxidation. Surface temperatures at the cooling metal - liquid quenchant interface and heat transfer coefficients are calculated using HT-Mod, a recently released computational code. Using this data, the temperature distribution was calculated. The corresponding residual stresses were calculated using ABAQUS. This work illustrates potential benefits of computational simulation to examine the expected impact of different quenchants and quenching conditions on a heat treatment process.