ICME guided property design: Room temperature hardness in cemented carbides

The potential change in EU regulations may affect the traditional W-C-Co based cemented carbides industry and a methodology is required to accelerate the materials development with alternative binders. This work presents the ICME (Integrated Computational Materials Engineering) framework and the improved models that will enable tailor-made materials design of cemented carbides. The cemented carbide hardness is one of the key properties of the composites and here its close relation to the binder composition is in focus. Modeling the influence of alternative binder materials on the hardness of cemented carbides offers a way to optimize the composite properties of prospective binder candidates virtually, thereby reducing the development time and costs drastically compared to a classical trial-and-error method. The outline of a genetic algorithm is presented and the integration of the required models and tools, that are, or will become, available within this ICME framework, are presented. • The developed computational framework allows for hardness design of conventional and alternative binder cemented carbides. • Investigating Ni-Fe based binder systems shows the importance of alloying elements for tailoring the binder hardness. • The integration in an optimization scheme based on a genetic algorithm enables automatic design of composite properties.