Development of an experimental device to study high temperature oxidation

An experimental device was designed and constructed to study the oxidation behaviour of steel. The device consists in a special chamber mounted within the frame of a servo-hydraulic testing machine holding the sample being studied. The atmosphere within the chamber can be controlled to be either inert or oxidation by flowing either nitrogen or dry air: a flow of 14 Nl/min was used for replacing either atmosphere in less than 0.1 s. The sample of steel was heated up to the testing temperature by induction. The testing procedure was designed to be flexible enough for heating up and cooling down the sample without oxidation. The device allowed for scales that ranged from a few micrometers to close to 300 mu m. The growth kinetics recorded in this work was found to agree with previous published data. It can be concluded that the present device allows for studying the behaviour of thin crusts of steel oxide, which are classified as tertiary and can damage the surface of the steel during rolling.