Replacing carcinogen cobalt in hard metal products

Although emission directives have been sharpened over the last decades, environment pollution due to hard metal technologies remains a health threatening factor. Hard metals are essential parts of the mass production in automotive, aerospace and consumer product sectors.

Today a large amount of carcinogen cobalt (Co) particles are emitted upon manufacturing and usage of hard metals based on cemented carbides.

A major fraction of outdoor airborne Co particles is traffic generated, especially in Nordic countries with the frequent use of studded tires.Cemented carbides are composite materials consisting primarily of tungsten carbide as hard phase and Co as binder phase.

Many attempts to replace the Co binder have been made over the years, but so far no other solution has been able to provide equally good properties.

The main reason behind the unsuccessful attempts was the lack of understanding of the deformation behavior of the binder phase upon extreme load conditions.

Here we will employ the multi-principal-element-alloy strategy to put forward a consistent road for identifying alternative binders which maintain the outstanding properties of cemented carbides but avoid all harmful elements.

The success of our approach is ensured by our world-leading position in modeling the plasticity of metals and multi-component alloys.

The project will attract new PhDs, and in collaboration with industrial partners, we will propose new binder phases for green hard metal solutions.