Some problems related to thermophysical properties of selected barrel steels

Abstract The paper discusses selected issues related to the thermophysical properties of selected barrel steels, which the authors have been dealing with over the last few years, i.e. 38HMJ (1.8509), 30HN2MFA, X37CrMoV5-l hot-work tool steel (1.2343), DUPLEX (1.4462) and MARAGING 350 (1.6355). In some of them, i.e. in the X37CrMoV5-1 hot work tool steel, 38HMJ, 30HN2MFA, a ferrite-austenite phase transition occurs, which causes shrinkage of the material. During a series of shots, multiple shrinkage of material degrades the barrel channel and deteriorates the ballistic parameters of the cannon barrel. Another problem concerns the apparent specific heat that we get from the DSC measurement and the dependence of the specific heat on temperature in the form that we use for the numerical simulations. The point is that the phase transition effect should not be taken into account twice, i.e. in the thermal diffusivity characteristics and in the specific heat characteristics. For all selected steels the thermophysical properties, i.e. thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity, specific heat and thermal expansion, were obtained in a wide range of temperature, so they can be used as input data for numerical simulations.