Development of wear resistance Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI) material for Duck foot cultivator sweep

The duck foot cultivators are widely used for ploughing in dry land cultivation. More than 10000 units annually are sold in the state of Madhya Pradesh alone. During ploughing, the sweeps are subjected to severe abrasive wear due to substandard grade of material in general and inappropriate heat treatments in particular. The service life of sweep varies between 1–2 seasons (~200 h). The frequent replacement of sweeps leads to additional cost besides the down time of the machines and low machine out put. This paper aims to make a comparative assessment of elemental, mechanical, micro structural and tribological properties in comparison to Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI)grade 4 material, a new material widely used in North America & Europe for wear resistance application in critical parts of agricultural machines. Three body abrasive wear tests using dry sand using rubber wheel abrasion tester as per ASTM G65-81 shows that the ADI grade 4 exhibited significantly low wear rate, lower abrasion coefficient and 20–50% higher benefit cost ratio compared to commercially available brand sweep material.