A New Approach to Study Vapor Transport in Liquid Quenching Process and Its Application to Investigate the Gear Distortion in Cluster Quenching Environment

Oil quenching is a common heat treatment process for gear production. Because of the large temperature drop, more than 750°C in the case of steel quenching, the heat transfer mechanisms are very different in each of the three boiling regimes and the quenching efficiency is further coupled to the vapor transport on the metal surface. In this paper, we utilized a validated numerical method to model the boiling process and developed a visualization procedure to study the vapor transport on the metal surface. Then we use the finding to explain the difference in the thermocouple data in various location for a single object quenching environment. Once the effect of vapor transport on quenching efficiency is fully understood, we apply the method to estimate the neighboring effect in the cluster quenching environment.