Large caliber gun barrels are exposed to deferent kinds of high strain, from pressure to wear, with influence of chemical, and thermal effects. With the ever increasing demand on better guns, the demand on the barrel increases as well. This study will go through the thermal part of the strain that affect the gun barrel steel. The will be experiment on how thermal cyclic load affect low alloy steel, documentation the cracks, hardness and create computer simulations on the physical experiments.

The heating experiment is carried though by the help of an induction coil that is the supplement for the burring propellant to not get any unwanted chemical residue. The heat and timeframe of one cycle, does not one hundred percent representative the reality but it will still give a got comparison of the materials tested. The experiment was completed on five different material 1.2709-A1, -A2, -B, CrMoV, and H13, which are all used in the tooling industry and therefore interesting material in a gun barrel.

The material show vastly different cracks intensity and crack length, with is connected to grain size, thermal conductivity, coefficient of the thermal expansion, strength, toughness, and hardness. The hardness measurement showed a phenomena that does not happen in a fired gun barrel, which is thermal softening. Thermal softening happens in this test for the simple reason that the temperate was never high enough to make the steel phase change to austenite. This makes the secondary carbide crystals to recrystallize into larger ones to lower their energy, in turn reducing hardness and strength. The simulations show that there is tensile stress at the outside, closest to the induction coil, and compressive stress on the inside of the test sample. It also gave a good insight on how the properties affect the steel. 

The material 1.2709B got the best results from the experiment conducted in the study, few and short cracks, almost nonexistent hardness softening. It has the ductility and toughness to reduce the softening and the strength and thermal conductivity to stand against the major crack formations.