Metallurgical Behavior of SAE 1045 Steel Quenched Into Chemically Modified Bioquenchants

It is well known that petroleum oil basestocks possess a number of limitations such as being a non-renewable basestock but even more importantly they are considered relatively toxic with limited biodegradability. One class of basestock that is renewable with excellent biodegradabity characteristics and generally, but not always, non-toxic  are animal and seed oils. The quenching performance of many different animal and vegetable oil compositions has been reported. However, as a class, they suffer from generally poor thermal oxidative stability, even when containing oxidation inhibitors, when compared to quenchants derived from petroleum oil thus limiting their potential commercial utility. One method of potentially addressing this problem is to chemically modify the vegetable oil to produce increased resistance to thermal oxidative degradation. This presentation will discuss the physical properties and quenching performance of epoxidized soybean oil-based formulations and the resulting metallurgical properties, hardness and microstructures, obtained which have not been reported previously.