Study the effect of lubrication on hardness in the ring compression test

Abstract

Mild Steel is commonly used to produce automotive parts such as shafts, gears and bearings. This paper focuses on the hardness distribution in the mild steel ring specimen after compress under rigid dies. Three different types of lubricants namely boric acid, Vaseline, grease and dry condition were employed as lubricants and the coefficient of friction corresponding to the lubricant evaluated using standard ‘Ring compression test’. The strain distributions obtained from the studies were used to predict the hardness of the ring specimen. The results show that coefficient of friction is the most influencing parameter for hardness distribution. It can be reported from the experimental results that the hardness is not uniform at surface the deformed ring specimen and it varies from inner edge to outer edge on the surface and for dry condition variation in hardness not uniform compare to grease.