Steel Heat Treatment Engineering Handbook

The same bar of steel can be soft enough to machine, tough enough to survive an impact at −40 °C, or hard enough to resist wear. Heat treatment decides which. This handbook shows you how to make that decision with engineering certainty.

Heat treatment is specified with one line on a drawing and judged by one hardness number, yet it determines whether a shaft cracks, a gear pits, or a spring fails early. Steel Heat Treatment Engineering Handbook treats it as an engineering discipline. Every process is traced to its physical mechanism and, wherever possible, to a calculation you can perform and check.

Theory you can calculate with. The classical tools of the field are developed from first principles and applied to real parts: the Fe-C diagram, Fick's laws and error-function solutions, Avrami and Koistinen-Marburger kinetics, Grossmann's ideal critical diameter and the Jominy test, the Hollomon-Jaffe tempering parameter, carbon-potential equilibria, Lehrer's nitriding diagram, and electromagnetic reference depth.

You will learn how to:

• Read the Fe-C diagram, choose austenitizing conditions, and control grain growth
• Predict microstructure and hardness from TTT and CCT diagrams
• Calculate hardenability, read Jominy curves and H-bands, and select a steel for a section size
• Characterize quenchants, estimate quench severity, and choose oil, polymer, salt, or gas
• Understand and control residual stress, distortion, and quench cracking
• Design tempering cycles and avoid tempered-martensite and temper embrittlement
• Design carburizing cycles with carbon-potential control, erf and finite-difference models, boost-diffuse schedules, and low-pressure carburizing
• Control gas, plasma, and nitrocarburizing processes with the nitriding potential and the Lehrer diagram
• Select frequency and power for induction hardening and verify the pattern
• Heat treat tool, stainless, bearing, and spring steels correctly
• Apply AMS 2750 pyrometry, CQI-9, SPC, and metallographic and hardness testing
• Investigate heat-treatment failures and write specifications that prevent them

Built to be used. 18 chapters contain 158 worked examples, each closing with a discussion of what the result means, and 24 industrial case analyses with data, root cause, and corrective action. There are 249 exercises with answers, 49 technical figures, and 169 tables. Twelve reference steels and six recurring components (a shaft, a gear, a pin, a crankshaft, a die, and a spring) carry calculations consistently from chapter to chapter. Appendices provide hardness conversions, compositions and critical temperatures, error-function tables, and hardenability data, followed by a glossary and a full index.

Written for mechanical, materials, and manufacturing engineers, heat-treat process and quality engineers, and upper-level students who have taken introductory materials science, thermodynamics, and calculus.