A Deep Learning-Based Approach to the Estimation of Jominy Profile of Medium-Carbon Quench Hardenable Steels

The possibility to estimate the Jominy profile of steel based on its chemical composition is of utmost importance and high practical relevance for industries, at enables a preliminary assessment of the suitability of a specific steel grade to a particular application or to the requirements of a customer, by saving time and resources as the Jominy end-quench test is costly and time consuming. More importantly, an estimator can be used in steel grade design, by supporting the investigation of the most suitable chemistry to meet some given specifications. The paper proposes a novel approach to estimate the hardenability profile of medium Carbon quench hardenable steels, which exploits the potential of deep learning to correlate the steel metallurgy to the entire shape of the curve rather than to its single points, by thus being adaptable to a wide range of steel grades while providing very accurate estimates. Moreover, the proposed approach is suitable implement a transfer learning paradigm, as it can exploit the knowledge acquired by training on a specific dataset to adapt the model to different steel grades for which less data or data holding different features are available.