Application of Tungsten Carbide Wear Parts

Tungsten carbide is widely used in industry because of its extraordinary properties. Because of its wear resistance and hardness (9.8 Moe's scale), tungsten carbide is ideally suited for wear parts, other machine parts and dies which are subject to severe service conditions, such as high temperatures, corrosion and abrasion.. In recent years, tungsten carbide has emerged as a superior alternative to steel in many industrial applications.

A large portion of the tungsten volume in cemented carbide is today used in wear part applications, where there is a wide range of products from the very small (such as balls for ball-point pens) to large and heavy products, such as punches, dies or hot rolls for rolling mills in the steel industry.

Most of these tungsten carbide wear parts and the mining tools are made of straight WC-Co hardmetals without any addition of other carbides.

Fine and ultrafine grained WC hardmetals have become more and more important today in the field of wear parts, tools for chipless forming and cutting tools for cast iron, non ferrous alloys and wood.

The first submicron hardmetals were launched on the market in the late 1970s and, since this time, the micro-structures of such hardmetals have become finer and finer. The main interest in hardmetals with such finer grain sizes derives from the understanding that hardness and wear resistance increase with decreasing WC grain size.