| Summary: | New stricter environmental legislation requires lower emissions and fuel consumption of automotive engines. Therefore the fuel efficiency must be increased but this leads to higher loads in the engine. As for the exhaust system it is affected by higher thermomechanical loads. Until today the turbo manifold has been nitrocarburized in order to increase the wear resistance in slip joints with other exhaust components. The problem is that there is no knowledge of how the nitrocarburizing affects the thermomechanical properties of the material. The purpose of this thesis work is to examine the difference in thermomechanical properties with and without nitrocarburizing on the three different ductile irons High Silicon, SiMo51 and SiMo1000 intended for exhaust components. Thermo-mechanical fatigue (TMF) experiments were performed on test rods to evaluate difference in number of cycles to failure. In each cycle the test-rod was affected by a combination of mechanical loads and thermal loads resembling those found on exhaust components. Light optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and x-ray radiography were used to examine microcracks and damage mechanisms of the materials. It was found that the nitrocarburizing did not affect the number of cycles to failure in any large extent. Further, it was also found that SiMo1000 on average has the longest lifetime followed by SiMo51 and High Silicon. Although, the difference is small for many loadings and taking a 95% confidence band into account the curves overlap for many loading cases.
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