Emission regulations for heavy-duty diesel engines are becoming increasingly restrictive to limit the environmental impacts of exhaust gases and particles. Increasing the specific power output of diesel engines would improve fuel efficiency and greatly reduce emissions, but these changes could lead to increased exhaust gas temperature, increasing demands on the exhaust manifold material. This is currently the ferritic ductile cast iron alloy SiMo51, containing about 4 wt% Si and ~1 wt% Mo, which operates close to its fatigue and oxidation resistance limits at peak temperature (750C). To ensure high durability at higher temperatures, three different approaches to improving the life of exhaust manifolds were developed in this thesis. The first approach was to modify SiMo51 by adding different combinations of Cr and Ni to improve its high-temperature strength and oxidation resistance, or by applying a thermal barrier coating (TBC) to reduce the material temperature and thereby improve fatigue life. In the second approach, new materials for engine components, e.g. austenitic ductile iron and cast stainless steel, were investigated for their high-temperature fatigue and oxidation properties. In order to identify the most suitable alloys for this application, in the third the environmental effects of the corrosive diesel exhaust gas on the fatigue life of SiMo51 were investigated. The high-temperature oxidation resistance of SiMo51 at 700 and 800C in air was found to be improved by adding Cr, whereas Ni showed adverse effects. The effects of solid-solution hardening from Ni and precipitation hardening from Cr were low at 700C, with improvements only at lower temperatures. Applying a TBC system, providing thermal protection from a ceramic topcoat and oxidation protection from a metallic bond coat, resulted in only small reductions in material temperature, but according to finite element calculations still effectively improved the fatigue life of a turbo manifold. Possible alternative materials to SiMo51 identified were austenitic cast ductile iron Ni-resistant D5S and austenitic cast stainless steel HK30, which provided high durability of exhaust manifolds up to 800 and 900C, respectively. Corrosion fatigue testing of SiMo51 at 700C in diesel exhaust gas demonstrated that the corrosive gas reduced fatigue life by 30-50% compared with air and by 60-75% compared with an inert environment. The reduced fatigue life was associated with a mechanism whereby the crack tip oxidized, followed by crack growth. Thus another potential benefit of TBC systems is that the bond coat may reduce oxidation interactions and further improve fatigue life. These results can be used for selecting materials for exhaust applications. They also reveal many new research questions for future studies. Combining the different approaches of alloy modification, new material testing and improving the performance using coatings widened the scope of how component life in exhaust manifolds can be improved. Moreover, the findings on environmental interactions on SiMo51 fatigue provide a completely new understanding of these processes in ductile irons, important knowledge when designing components exposed to corrosive environments. The novel facility developed for high-temperature corrosion fatigue testing can be useful to other researchers working in this field. / <p>QC 20150507</p>

The present work was conducted at Scania CV AB and has as main goal to produce a cast steel guideline. There is a great need to conduct a cast steel guideline, in order to help designers in their process to choose suitable materials and methods to produce lightweight components with higher performance. This work contains information related to mechanical properties, casting processes, castability, machinability, defect characterization, heat treatments, weldability and surface treatments of cast steels. This work was limited to cast steels which could be applied on two specific components of the truck, a bracket which is a structural component of chassis subjected to fatigue and a turbo manifold which is subjected to creep, oxidation, corrosion-, thermal- and mechanical- fatigue. A benchmark search was performed focused on these two components. A characterization of a cast stainless steel turbo manifold prototype was performed in the as-cast state, which included microstructural analyzes and hardness measurements. Besides this initial characterization, a set of heat treatments were conducted, in order to study the possibility to eliminate the initial grain boundary carbides. The main conclusions of this work are that cast steel has potential to be a material choice in many applications due to its wide range of properties. For structural parts, cast steel is advantageous compared with cast iron when for instance welding and high strength combined with high fracture toughness are requirements. For high temperature resistance components, cast steel or more precisely cast stainless steel, is advantageous for service at temperatures &gt;750 ºC,besides its higher price. The annealing heat treatment followed by an aging treatment eliminated most of the grain boundary carbides and increase the hardness through a fine dispersion of carbides in matrix, which can also increase the creep resistance. / Examensarbetet utfördes på Scania CV AB med främsta målet att utarbeta en vägledande guide för gjutstål. Det finns ett stort behov av att sammanställa en guideline för gjutstål, med syfte att hjälpa konstruktörer i deras process att välja lämpliga material och metoder för att producera lättviktskomponenter med högre prestanda. Arbetet innehåller information om mekaniska egenskaper, gjutningsprocesser, gjutbarhet, skärbarhet, defektkarakterisering, värmebehandlingar, svetsbarhet, ytbehandling och mycket annat gällande gjutstål. Detta arbete var begränsat till gjutstål som kan tillämpas för två specifika komponenter i lastbilen, en konsol som är en strukturell komponent i chassit som utsätts för utmattning och ett turbogrenrör vilket är en komponent som utsätts för högtemperaturcykler. En benchmark utfördes med fokus på dessa två komponenter. Slutligen gjordes en karakterisering av turbogrenrörsprototypen i rostfritt stål, i det gjutnatillståndet, vilket inkluderade mikroanalyser och hårdhetsmätningar. Förutom den förstakarakteriseringen, utfördes en uppsättning värmebehandlingar för att undersöka möjligheten att eliminera de initiala korngräns-karbiderna. De viktigaste slutsatserna av detta arbete är att gjutstål har potential att bli ett materialval i många applikationer på grund dess breda egenskaper. Konstruktionsdelar i gjutstål är fördelaktiga jämfört med gjutjärn, till exempel vid svetsning och när hög hållfasthet i kombination med hög brottseghet är nödvändigt. För högtemperaturs-komponenter är gjutstål, eller mer exakt, gjutna rostfria stål fördelaktiga för service vid temperaturer &gt;750 ºC, med undantag för dess högre pris. Glödgningsvärmebehandling följt av åldringsbehandling eliminerar de flesta av korngräns-karbiderna och ökar hårdheten genom en fin dispersion av karbider i matrisen, vilket också kan öka krypmotståndet.