ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION IN THE FIELD OF APPLICATION OF ELECTRON-BEAM PROCESSING OF VARIOUS ALLOYS. PART 1
Extension of the service life of metal parts and structures, as well as ensuring the reliability and safety of their work, is inextricably linked with the technologies used at the manufacturing stage. The requirements imposed today on new products, both from the side of operation and from the point of view of environmental friendliness and economic efficiency of their production, do not allow solving the assigned tasks using only traditional technologies. In this aspect, the development of physical materials science in recent years has become possible due to the achievement of a new level of capabilities of electron-beam installations used to harden the surface of products from various alloys by electron-beam processing (EBP). In the article, in two parts, the analysis of research work in the field of application of electron beams is carried out, both as an independent method of processing, and in combination with other technologies that allow modifying the surface layers of metal parts and products in order to improve their mechanical and operational properties. In the first part of the work, the main advantages of EBP over other technologies based on concentrated energy flows are indicated. The low accuracy of the existing mathematical models intended for the analytical assessment of the thermal field of the surface layers of metal multicomponent alloys processed by electron beams is noted, which requires long-term and expensive studies of the effect of irradiation modes on the physicochemical state of the material. The analysis of the works of authors' teams from the Russian Federation for the last 10 years, devoted to the EBP of the surface layers of steels, titanium and aluminum alloys with the use of classical heat treatment or without it, has been carried out. The analysis showed that the method is applicable for processing a wide range of metallic materials and allows, after application, to significantly increase the mechanical and fatigue characteristics of the processed products.