Breakthrough in the Processing Technology of Wear-resistant Steel Hydraulic Valve Seats: Double Improvement in Precision and Service Life

Recently, news of technological innovation has emerged in the domestic hydraulic equipment manufacturing industry. A high-tech enterprise has successfully developed a new generation of processing technology for wear-resistant steel hydraulic valve seats. Through the integrated innovation of material modification, numerical control processing, and surface treatment technologies, the service life of the valve seats has been increased by more than 40%, reaching the international leading level. The person in charge of the technical team introduced that traditional hydraulic valve seats often suffer from seal failure due to insufficient wear resistance of the materials. However, the new process selects high-carbon chromium-molybdenum alloy steel as the base material, and optimizes the crystal structure through vacuum melting technology, enabling the material to achieve a hardness of HRC62-65 while maintaining its toughness. In the processing stage, a five-axis linkage CNC machine tool is used in conjunction with a micron-level grinding process to ensure that the flatness of the sealing surface of the valve seat is controlled within 0.002mm. Coupled with the laser cladding ceramic coating technology, the surface roughness is reduced to below Ra0.1. "The key breakthrough lies in precisely controlling the depth of the carburized layer in the heat treatment within the range of 1.2-1.5mm," pointed out process engineer Zhang Ming. By optimizing the quenching process curve through finite element simulation, the internal residual stress distribution of the material is made more uniform, effectively preventing the valve seat from generating micro-cracks in high-pressure scenarios. Verified by a third-party laboratory, the leakage rate of the valve seats produced by this process has always been lower than 5ml/min during the 2000-hour pulse test, a 75% reduction compared to the traditional process. Currently, this technology has been applied in construction machinery and ship hydraulic systems. A large-scale shield machine manufacturing enterprise has reported that after adopting the new valve seats, the equipment failure rate has decreased by 32%, and the maintenance cycle has been extended to 18 months. Industry insiders believe that the industrialization of this processing technology for wear-resistant steel hydraulic valve seats is expected to promote the upgrading of China's hydraulic components from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing" and break the foreign technological monopoly. Li Feng, the technical director of the enterprise, said that the next step will be to develop an automated inspection assembly line, and achieve real-time feedback of processing parameters through a machine vision system to further enhance the process stability. "We not only want to make the valve seats more wear-resistant, but also control the performance fluctuations of each batch of products within 3%," Li Feng said. With the breakthrough of this core technology, the process of self-sufficiency in high-end hydraulic valve seats in China is accelerating.