Carbon - Chromium - Vanadium

Tamara Velikanova, Mikhail Turchanin, Dmytro Pavlyuchkov, Vasyl Tomashyk

Introduction

Vanadium and chromium carbides are of high interest for hardmetal and high-speed steel applications owing to their high hardness (VC_1-x, after TiC, is the hardest among the transition metal carbides). The C-Cr-V system is a boundary of the quaternary C-Cr-Fe-V system, which is a critical alloy system for tool and high-speed steels. Knowledge of the C-Cr-V alloy phase diagram is essential for understanding the behavior of these steels during heat treatment and is the basis for improving properties or designing new alloys through the control of the amount of alloying addition. The ternary C-Cr-V system is a key system to control the vanadium and chromium distributions in carbides.