Abstract
In some applications like car armouring for personal safety, in bulk containers in pebbles working, in off-shore applications or in offroad-vehicles, impact of bodies with different sizes and high velocities has to be calculated in material design. A possibility to design under economical aspects is to use to low-cost material as substrate with a protective coating on its surface instead of using expensive bulk materials. One conceivable material system to be used as protective coating is WC-CoCr, which is usually applied by HVOF and shows high hardness combined with a good toughness of the matrix. These properties are very important for dissipation of the impact energy and for high fracture toughness. In the presented case study, WC-CoCr coatings with different carbide sizes were produced with the JP5000 system from TAFA. Projectiles with high velocities of more than 250 m/s were shot by an experimental shooting device on the coatings and for comparability on the uncoated substrate. Impact tests were done with balls and cylinders with varying impact angles between 10° and 90°. The powders and the coatings were characterized by means of microscopy and XRD. Furthermore, the hardness of the coatings was measured. After impact tests, the coatings were investigated with optical microscopy. In the case of ball impact, a significant dependency can be found between the impact behaviour and carbide size. Coatings with coarse carbides show the lowest impact depth. The dependency of the impact depth of coatings with one carbide size on their hardness level is relatively low. No dependencies of the carbide size or the hardness level can be found for impact with cylinders.
