Lab #3: Heat Treatment And Materials Testing Demonstration

|Course |MST 175: Introduction to Material Science |
|Lab Title |Lab #3: Heat Treatment and Materials Testing Demonstration |
|Name ||
|Date |10-14-09 |

Purpose

A tensile and hardness test wascompleted on one annealed and one quenched low carbon steel samples to understand how heat treatment and cooling processes change principal mechanical properties and to learn how testing equipment isused to compile this data.


Procedure

Heat Treatment:

The two samples were heated in an oven to 1650°F to allow both specimens to attain a face-centered cubic (FCC) lattice structure. Afterapproximately ten minutes, one sample was removed from the heated oven and quenched into a container of room temperature water to cool. The second specimen was retained in the oven and allowed to coolat room temperature.

Hardness Measurement:

A Rockwell hardness test was completed on both the quenched and the annealed samples and values were recorded.

Tensile Test:

The Instron materialtest machine was set up for test. The program for the test was set up to record the selected parameters of interest, including width and thickness of sample, maximum load, maximum extension, andnumber of data points collected, among other data records. The load cell was balanced and the annealed specimen was loaded onto the machine. After the extension was reset, the extensometer was attached tothe center of the sample. The machine was then turned on and the test ran until the sample failed through fracture.

The same procedure above was repeated for the annealed sample. It was instructedto remove the extensometers when safe to avoid damage to the equipment.

Data of material and test parameters and stress-strain graphs were obtained through the data acquisition and control...