from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Stainless steels are nowadays used in a wide range of industrial products. One example of their utilization in the industrial practice represents production of the exhaust systems components in the automotive industry. Corrosion-resistant materials intended to be processed by the forming technologies generally reveal very good deformation properties and high mechanical values as well. These properties are given mainly due to the high content of alloying elements, stability of the chemical composition and production technology. The submitted paper evaluates the influence of structure on the formability of two stainless steels 1.4301 (designation acc. to EN 10028-7-2016) used for production the exhaust system components. Each of the tested stainless steels is supplied by a different manufacturer. Despite the declared identical chemical composition and the same mechanical properties, one of the tested materials showed quite high level of scrap production. As a critical point of the production there was identified the cutting operation in combination with the subsequent expansion of the cut hole. During this operation, a massive crack occurred in one of the tested materials in the circumferential part of flange. Moreover, the crack always occurred in the identical location of the product. Own formability evaluation was assessed by means of a static tensile test and structural analysis performed on a TESCAN MIRA 3 electron microscope. In addition to these tests, a hole expansion test with different adjustment of cutting clearance was also performed. Based upon the measured data, there were formulated conclusions regarding the causes of cracking in the case of one tested corrosion-resistant material designed for production the exhaust components.
Keywords: Stainless Steel, Structural Analysis, Formability, Electron Microscope, Hole Expansion Test© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.