The common failure forms of mechanical parts are wear, fracture and so on. Among them, wear will have a great impact on the service life and reliability of mechanical parts. The wear-resistant metal materials used at home and abroad mainly include high manganese steel, low alloy steel and wear-resistant cast iron. Wear resistant cast iron refers to the white cast iron with high hardness and high wear resistance, in which the carbon in the alloy mainly exists in the form of carbide. During the spring and Autumn period, the iron hoe and the metal shovel were invented in China. In Europe, in 1722, white malleable cast iron (a kind of cast iron after graphitization annealing, the structure is graphite + ferrite) appeared. At the same time, ordinary white cast iron also began to be used in industry as anti-wear material. In the 1930s, nickel hard white cast iron was successfully developed, and a new breakthrough was made in the research of wear-resistant white cast iron. However, ordinary white cast iron and nickel hard white cast iron have some disadvantages, such as high brittleness, low hardness and insufficient nickel resources, which can not meet the requirements of industrial development.
In less than two years since the advent of nickel hard cast iron, the United States and Britain have successfully developed a kind of high chromium white cast iron, which not only solves the contradiction of lack of nickel, but also has better toughness and wear resistance than hard nickel white cast iron. After the emergence of high chromium white cast iron, it began to be widely used as anti-wear materials in construction, electric power, mining, processing and other industries.
With the development of industry, wear-resistant cast iron is required to have good wear resistance in the environment of cyclic load and high impact load. In order to meet the requirements of industrial development, in recent decades, domestic and foreign foundry workers and researchers have studied the influence and role of various properties, such as alloy elements, carbides, matrix structure and heat treatment process, on wear-resistant cast iron, so as to continuously improve the wear-resistant performance of wear-resistant cast iron and simplify the production process.