Abstract: The present research work was carried out to examine the influence of various combinations of austempering heat treatments on the wear behaviour of Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI). Eight samples were taken for the analysis and all the samples were austenised at a temperature of 950⁰C for 30 minutes. A set of four samples were austempered at temperatures of 300⁰C and 400⁰C for 5, 15, 30 and 120 minutes and resulting microstructures were characterized through optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction. By varying the austempering temperature, significant changes were obtained in their morphology and rate of bainitic ferrite and residual austenite. Wear test was carried out using a pin on disc machine for a load of 2kg in which the test was undertaken on each of the sample for total time duration of 6 hours in step of 1 hour. The cumulative weight loss was used to determine the wear rate by the slope of weight loss against time. At low austenising temperature (300⁰C), it led to the formation of ferritic thin and compact needles, while, at higher austempering temperature like 400⁰C, wide feather-like blades of ferrite were observed in microstructure and for various austempering temperature, the morphology of residual austenite phase has changed, in a way that it changed from thin and delicate state at low temperatures into thick block-shaped state at high austempering temperatures. The coarse austenite microstructure exhibited higher wear rate than fine ausferrite microstructure. The results indicated that samples austempered at 300⁰C shows better wear resistance than samples austempered at 400⁰C for respective austempered time.
 
Key words: Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI), austenite, critical temperature, wear

Cite: Arun V. K. and Sandeep K. A., "Characterization and Sliding Wear Analysis of Austempered Ductile Iron," International Journal of Materials Science and Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1-15, March 2016. doi: 10.17706/ijmse.2016.4.1.1-15