Hardenability and distortion control of steel parts in High Pressure Hydrogen Quenching

Recently, more and more attentions are paid to High Pressure Hydrogen Quenching (HPHQ) for its advantages such as environmental friendliness and low distortion compared with oil and water quenching. Some equipment for HPHQ has been made in industry, but very few systematic studies have been made on this new technology till today. As a result, heat treating people are urgent to find out the production condition when HPHQ will produce similar results (e.g., microstructure and hardness) as typical oil quenching. This paper answers this question by performing numerical modelling of quenching of a single part. The possibility of minimising distortion by choosing a proper quenching orientation is also demonstrated in this paper.