초록
Heat treatment is a controlled heating and cooling process to improve the physical and/or mechanical properties of metal products without changing their shapes. Today finite element method is widely used to simulate lots of manufacturing processes including heat treatment and surface hardening processes, which aims to reduce the number of time- and cost-consuming experimental tryouts. In this study we tried, using this method, to simulate the full carburizing process that consists of carburizing, diffusing and quenching, and to predict the distribution of carbon contents, phase fraction and hardness, thermal deformation and other mechanical characteristics as the results. In the finite element analysis deformation, heat transfer, phase transformation and diffusion effects are taken into consideration. The carburizing process of a lock gear, a part of the car seat recliner, that is manufactured by the fine blanking process is adopted as the analysis model. The numerical results are discussed and partly compared with experimental data. And a combination of process parameters that is expected to give the highest surface hardness is proposed on the basis of this discussion.
