The influence of the hard-faced layers pattern on the wear resistance of the wheel loader’s bucket teeth

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the investigation of the influence of the hard-faced layers pattern on the wear resistance of the wheel loader bucket teeth. The bucket teeth of the wheel loader are the parts that are most exposed to wear and the reason for this is that they are in direct contact with the materials being loaded (mainly rock materials). The materials that are loaded often have a hardness that is greater than the hardness of the teeth themselves and with the addition of sliding of that hard materials over the bucket teeth that occurs during loading, material loss from the bucket teeth (i.e. wear) is inevitable. Through earlier research, it was established that by reparing worn mechanisation parts by hard-facing, instead of buying new parts, great economic savings can be achieved. In this sense, for this specific part, the appropriate hard-facing technology according to the base material has been prepared. The suitability of the welding technology itself was verified through several different tests, and through the tests presented in this paper, the wear resistance of bucket teeth that were hard-faced according to three different layer patterns were tested. Each pattern was applied to a separate tooth. The first pattern implied that the axes of the hard-faced layers are parallel to the direction of sliding of the material during loading. In the case of the second pattern, the axes of the hard-faced layers are perpendicular to the sliding direction, and the third pattern orientation was a combination of crossed hard-faced layers, which have the shape of a honeycomb. Based on the obtained results it was determined that the first pattern shows the best wear resistance, as it allows for easiest sliding of particles that are being loaded.