Properties of WC–Co hardmetals as a function of their composition and microstructural parameters

Research into WC–Co submicron hardmetals involving measurement of hardness, coercivity and microstructural characterization, as well as analysis and comparison of results from recent literature led to the development of a unified constitutive expression for Vickers hardness in a form that separates the effects of the tungsten carbide grain size from those of the cobalt binder volume fraction. With the proposed expression for HV one may recalculate and compare hardness values for hardmetals featuring the same average grain size but differing in the binder matrix content. The paper shows that, in contrast to the Lee-Gurland model, the proposed constitutive expression framework treats the hardmetal hardness as a function of the carbide skeleton hardness (HWC) and contiguity (C) described as HV = CHWC. The carbide skeleton hardness depends on the WC grain size only, and it is described by the Hall-Petch equation. The results of parallel hardness and coercivity measurements led to an empirical equation relating Hc to the WC grain size and the Co volume fraction. Based on the complete experimental data, the relationship between the coercivity and Vickers hardness was explored, and a simplified relationship between these physical values was proposed to carry out the primary HV evaluation based on the measured coercivity values. As noted in the paper, the above equations are valid for relatively narrow WC grain size distributions with a maximum coefficient of variation of 0.5.