Investigating the effect of ferritic filler materials on the mechanical and metallurgical properties of Hardox 400 steel welded joints Ajay Gupta, Varun Sharma ⇑ , Parul Kumar, Ankit Thakur Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, Punjab, India article info Article history: Received 7 April 2020 Received in revised form 27 May 2020 Accepted 29 May 2020 Available online xxxx Keywords: Hardox400 steel Shielded metal arc welding process Ferritic fillers Mechanical properties Joint efficiency abstract Hardox 400 steel is currently being used as wear resistant material in extremely high abrasion wear applications. Owing to extremely high hardness and strength, welding remains a serious concern for these steels. Thus the aim of this work is to achieve the matching weld metal strength and toughness for 20 mm thick Hardox 400 steel plates by fabricating three shielded metal arc welded joints using three ferritic filler electrodes (viz. E8018, E9018 and E11018). Results revealed that the maximum joint effi- ciency and impact toughness of the welded joint was achieved through E11018 electrode, followed by E9018 and E8018 electrodes. Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 2nd International Con- ference on Recent Trends in Metallurgy, Materials Science and Manufacturing. 1. Introduction A wide range of attractive mechanical properties and low pro- duction cost compared to other materials make steel as a most ver- satile material worldwide. A classification of low alloy abrasion resistant steels is designed to enhance the mechanical and abra- sion resistant properties to allow them to use in various applica- tions such as lighter trucks, crushing mills, conveyors, loading buckets & bulldozers, crushers, chutes etc. A new weldable steel grade Hardox 400 is being used by leading manufacturers such as Hitachi, Komatsu and Caterpillar to fabricate the beds of heavy-duty dump trucks [1]. Generally, high hardness steel is used at a place, where, reduction in terms of weight and penetration resistance is key factors [2,3]. Welding of Q & T steels are generally subjected to hydrogen induced cracking (HIC) which leads to its poor performance in terms of mechanical properties [4]. Thus, to avoid HIC in ultrahigh strength steels, low hydrogen ferritic elec- trodes are used which are non-hygroscopic and thus avoids mois- ture absorption from air. Saxena A et al. [5] studied the joint efficiency of the weldments fabricated by austenitic stainless steel (ASS) and Low Hydrogen Ferrite (LHF) using multi pass shielded metal arc welding (SMAW) of 500 T steel. Results revealed that welded joint fabricated by ASS had 30.6% joint efficiency whereas the LHF showed the joint efficiency of 41.7%. For AISI 4340 Q&T steel, the joint fabricated by ASS electrode showed good impact toughness, whereas the quality of weld in terms of higher tensile strength was found better when welded with LHF steel electrode [3,6]. Another author concluded that using two different grades of ASS filler material (E309L and 18Cr-8Ni-6Mn), the efficiency of welds was found to be 72 percent. The Charpy impact toughness of the weldment when welded using E309L filler material was found to be comparatively better than the base metal (BM) and the welded joint fabricated using 18Cr-8Ni-6Mn filler material [7]. Experimental studies carried out on the welding of JFE- EH400 steel (Q&T) showed that the welded joints fabricated using ferritic filler material observed better tensile strength than auste- nitic and hybrid (austenitic + ferritic) welded joints [8]. Sharma and Shahi [9] investigated the effect of micro-alloying additions in the Q&T steel welded joints and observed a significant refine- ment of grain structure within the fusion zone and thus better mechanical properties as compared to other ferritic welds. Weld- ing of high strength Q&T low alloy steel (YS of 670 MPa) of plate thickness 20 mm using shielded metal arc welding (SMAW) pro- cess showed that a preheat of 100 °C and a heat input of 14.9 kJ/ cm gives an excess static fatigue limit (710–794 MPa) than the minimum specified yield strength of the BM (670 MPa) which indi- cated good resistance to cold cracking of steel [10,11]. From the available literature, it is clearly evident that very scanty informa- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.05.788 2214-7853/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 2nd International Conference on Recent Trends in Metallurgy, Materials Science and Manufacturing. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: guptaa@nitj.ac.in (A. Gupta), bsharmav@nitj.ac.in (V. Sharma), dankit.ip.18@nitj.ac.in (A. Thakur). Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Materials Today: Proceedings journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matpr Please cite this article as: A. Gupta, V. Sharma, P. Kumar et al., Investigating the effect of ferritic filler materials on the mechanical and metallurgical prop- erties of Hardox 400 steel welded joints, Materials Today: Proceedings, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.05.788