Investigation of wear resistance of dry and cryogenic turned metastable austenitic steel shafts and dry turned and ground carburized steel shafts in the radial shaft seal ring system

The state of the art industrial manufacturing process to produce shafts as counter surfaces for radial shaft seal rings is plunge grinding. This process consists of three major steps. The blank is turned to a slight diameter-oversize followed by the heat treatment and the hard-finishing by plunge grinding. The geometric surface structures of the resulting shafts in general exhibit a stochastic distribution. These surface characteristics contribute to a reliable and stable sealing functionality. And the surface and subsurface hardness generally leads to a higher wear resistance of the shaft. Motivated by economic benefits and in order to achieve a compact production process for at least ten years, turning is investigated as an alternative manufacturing process. However due to the resulting lead structure on the shaft surface and the associated risk of leakage it has not become prevalent yet. In this paper turned shafts of the metastable austenitic steel AISI 347 (1.4550, X6CrNiNb1810) are investigated as alternative material for counter surfaces of radial shaft seal rings and compared to turned shafts of carburized AISI 5115 (1.7131, 16MnCr5). In addition to surfaces dry turned at room-temperature, cryogenic turned AISI 347 counter surfaces are analyzed. By applying cryogenic cooling, the formation of deformation-induced alpha'-martensite in the surface layer is possible during the turning process. Endurance tests in radial shaft seal ring test rigs are performed and complemented with detailed investigations of microstructure, micro-hardness and surface topography. The results are compared to results of state of the art ground AISI 5115 shafts. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.