DISCUSSIONS

Use your observations from the lab to support your discussion. Discuss your findings

The Rockwell C hardness test indicates that heat treatment and the coolingprocess have an affect on the hardness of the tool steel specimens. Excluding the controlsample, all specimens underwent the same heat treatment at a temperature of 900oC.The difference in the hardness values, is due to the cooling process selected for each specimen.The specimen that was allowed to cool slowly in open air yielded the least amount of increase in its hardness. The Rockwell Hardness value for this specimen was 34.8, nearly the specimens Rockwell Hardness of 37.5 that quench in oil. The water cooled specimen had an Rockwell Hardness of 59.8, which was a large increase compared to the other sample. The quenched specimen had an Rockwell Hardness of 59.8, which is slightly higher than the open air cooled sample. The quenched sample would have yielded a higher hardness value if it had been quenched in ice water. However, due to availability, tap water was used for the quenching process. It can therefore be concluded that for the plain carbon steel used in this experiment, a more expedient cooling process yields a harder end product. There were few sources of error in this experiment. Due to an inconsistent microstructure of each specimen used in the hardness test, vary Rockwell Hardness values were recorded. To compensate for this discrepancy, an average of three trials was used to determine the hardness of each sample. It would be difficult to improve the effectiveness of this experiment. However, a few modifications to the technique are in order. One such improvement would be to quench one of the test specimens in ice water and another specimen in water at ambient temperature for an identical time interval. This would allow for a more direct demonstration of the time and temperature constraints pertaining to material hardness. Another improvement would be to use more than one type of material. Having a controland a heat treated specimen for each type of material would demonstrate heat treatments affect on different materials.