Analysis of adhesive properties of B2 hardmetal surface

Hardmetals belong to hardly wettable materials, so they should not be bonded without previous removing the surface layer left after sintering. The paper describes mechanical and chemical methods of preparing hardmetal surface for such processes as gluing and brazing. Particular attention is paid to the method of electrolytic etching that offers very good energetic properties of hardly wettable materials. In order to analyse the surface adhesive properties of hardmetals, measurements of roughness and wetting angle were performed, as well as electron microscopic examination and EDX analysis.