from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Favourable impact of sub-zero treatment on variety of important properties of tools is known over a long period. Alternatively, metallurgical principles responsible for elevated hardness, improved wear performance, changes in the tempering response and toughness, and better dimensional stability are known only over the last few years, and they have never been presented in all their complexity. The topic of the current paper is to make an overview of the most important properties of ledeburitic cold work die steels, their improvements by application of sub-zero treatments, and to explain these improvements upon the basis of the latest elaborated theory explaining the metallurgical background of this kind of treatment.
Keywords: Sub-zero treatment, retained austenite, martensite, carbides, mechanical properties© 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.