vanadium carbide powder is a gray metallic powder with a cubic system structure and has good wear resistance, corrosion resistance and high temperature resistance. It is widely used as a hardness material in cutting tool, steel industry and alloys.
It can be produced by reducing carbon powder and vanadium pentoxide in high vacuum conditions at a temperature of about 1300 deg C. It can also be synthesized by the gas phase reaction of VCl4 vapour with hydrogen and hydrocarbon gases.
In the manufacturing of MC-type vanadium carbides for various applications, stoichiometric ratios of 1% vanadium with 0.20% carbon are used to produce large amounts of these compounds. It is a well-known fact that MC-type vanadium carbides are among the most important wear-resistant elements in metals and alloys because of their relative hardness.
Therefore, the primary object of this invention is to provide a powder metallurgy article that has a high content of substantially spherical and uniformly distributed MC-type vanadium carbides which impart greatly improved wear resistance to the article while maintaining toughness and workability at acceptable levels.
The article is characterized by having an amount of the MC-type vanadium carbides of at least 13.3 to 17.2 percent by volume and a balance of other metals, impurities, and other additives characteristic of typical steelmaking practice. The MC-type vanadium carbides present in the MC-type steels, such as Steels CPM 6V, CPM 10V, CPM 11V, CPM 14V, and ingot-cast steels such as Steels C6V and C11V, are characterized by having non-spherical or non-uniform distributions of MC-type vanadium carbides.
