Spring Steel Heat Treatment for the Quality Enhancement of Life Cycles of Military Vehicles Components

Abstract

Mechanical components in military vehicles, such as shafts, gears, stubs, forming groups and subgroups, are exposed to extreme service load while in operation in consequence of the environment. Within NATO, the Armed Forces of the Czech Republic deploy military vehicles in demanding mountainous terrain (e.g. in Afghanistan), or in the past, in areas with high dustiness and relative humidity (e.g. in Iraq), which results in shortening of the life cycles of these components and the increase in the financial means expended on the recovery of the vehicles operability. This paper is concerned with proposing a heat treatment of the material of military vehicles components that is supposed to extend the material service life and enhance the corrosion resistance. The experiment is complemented with a tensile test and chemical composition, microhardness and microstructure analyses.