Why should my company upgrade to a superior grade of abrasion-resistant steel?

Consistent properties from a proven steel in the most challenging applications provide greater efficiency benefits.

SSAB's Hardox^® 500 Tuf is the world’s hardest wear plate with structural properties. It delivers high strength, high hardness and guaranteed toughness in a single wear plate — a truly outstanding material for the most demanding applications. It's the new industry standard.

Hardox^® 500 Tuf wear plate is the next generation of wear plate and best suited for equipment exposed to heavy wear. It's the latest upgrade in the Hardox^® brand range and has proven itself worldwide in truck and tipper bodies, containers, mining dumpers, buckets and other attachments, agricultural equipment, liners and wear parts. Customer trials have shown nothing but success using it.

When customers learn the benefits of Hardox^® 500 Tuf, they want it as a standard, not as an option.

What is the best steel for abrasion resistance?

To get the best steel for abrasion resistance, think hard and tough for extreme applications. Thanks to its unrivaled toughness, Hardox^® 500 Tuf can perform as a structural material in recycling containers, dump bodies, buckets and other heavy-duty products, even in freezing conditions. Combining the best properties from Hardox^® 450 and Hardox^® 500, it’s your go-to wear plate with no real competition on the market. Hardox^® 500 Tuf is nearly as hard as Hardox^® 500 regular with a similar wear rate. Charpy is an important measure of the quality of a plate. It measures crack initiation and propagation. Tests showed the Charpy impact toughness of Hardox^® 500 TUF is almost as high as Hardox^® 450. This results in very good crack resistance in cold weather, freezing climates and in abusive environments. Hardox^® 500 Tuf offers the perfect trifecta of wear resistance, potential weight savings and dent resistance. That means increased payloads and service life for buckets, dippers and other ground-engaging attachments.

A bucket or attachment made in Hardox^® 500 Tuf combines extreme hardness and toughness with excellent welding and machining properties. Thanks to its high wear resistance, buckets and other attachments last longer. This helps you avoid costly repairs, rebuilds and parts replacement. Compared to traditional buckets with heavy wear packages, a bucket or dipper upgraded to Hardox^® 500 Tuf is wear resistant, tough and gives a longer service life with fewer add-on wear parts. You'll also achieve 30-50% longer service life over Hardox^® 450, and 85-100% longer service life compared to a standard 400 Brinell steel or other generic AR steel.

Read more success stories from customers using Hardox^® wear plate.

Read more about the different grades in the family of Hardox^® products.

How does Hardox^® 500 Tuf affect vehicle weight?

A tipper body made of Hardox^® 500 Tuf is lighter and more durable due to its unique combination of hardness and toughness. Hardox^® 500 Tuf lets companies design low-weight bodies with the wear-resistant qualities of much heavier versions.

With its high wear resistance, Hardox^® 500 Tuf is tough enough to perform as a structural wear plate in heavy-duty tipper and truck bodies. This offers new opportunities for reducing or eliminating supporting structures, allowing Hardox^® 500 Tuf to take the load instead. A tipper body without reinforcing beams is stronger and lighter, and saves a lot of costly welding. A lower tare weight of the body means more payload, less fuel per transported ton and fewer trips on the road.

Discover how Italian OME Mantella saved 365 kg (805 lbs.) in the body of their Stratosphere tipper trailer. The bottom line is tippers load more and last longer with Hardox^® 500 Tuf. Another benefit of upgrading to Hardox^® 500 Tuf is seen in a customer's heavy-duty mining truck that has been equipped with an upgraded body manufactured from Hardox^® 500 Tuf, Hardox^® 450 and Strenx^® 700, and designed without the need for wear liners or ongoing maintenance.

The weight of the new dump body is reduced by 18.5 tonnes, increasing the maximum payload and offering improved productivity, while maintaining the same maximum vehicle weight. In addition to this, the lifetime of the body is now 50% longer than the original, decreasing overall steel consumption and reducing the need for expensive liner replacements and overhauls.

Check out this additional example of benefits gained from upgrading to a thinner gage of Hardox^® 500 Tuf in a dump body:

• A traditional Hardox^® 450 dump body has a 1/4" floor plate thickness. The floor plate thickness of new Hardox^® 500 Tuf dump body is 3/16". Assuming 62,500 miles of vehicle usage a year, the end user reaps a weight savings and extra payload of 490 lbs., and saves 59 gallons of fuel a year with an annual CO₂ savings of 1,723 lbs.
• For the tipper producer, this means there's 25% less material to order, 30% increased welding speed, 30% less welding consumable, and 39% reduced bending force.

Thanks to the higher wear resistance of Hardox^® 500 Tuf, Mantella could reduce plate thickness of their tipper body by 1 mm. This saves an average of 364 kg of body weight — all with an upgrade to Hardox^® 500 Tuf.

How tough is Hardox^® 500 Tuf?

Hardox^® 500 Tuf offers a winning combination of lower weight, higher payload, and high impact. Its higher hardness equals higher yield strength. This translates to higher dent resistance. That's important because more dents accelerate wear.

Hardox^® 500 Tuf is proven to offer a longer service life for all kinds of abrasive materials, such as coal, iron ore, limestone, sand, granite and household waste containing metal.

After numerous trials with customers, Hardox^® 500 Tuf is a proven performer. One customer transported 40,000 metric tons of crushed rock for more than a year in freezing winter weather. After that year, they measured the thickness at the end section of the floor plate, and it showed only 5% wear on the plate.

With the Hardox^® WearCalc app, you can calculate and determine the increase in service life of equipment made in Hardox^® 500 Tuf compared with generic AR steel that have lower hardness values.

Hardox^® steel improve sustainability?

Thanks to its high wear resistance, Hardox^® wear plate helps to make equipment last longer. For equipment that needs to fight abrasion, Hardox^® wear steel can provide it with a lifetime twice that of conventional steels — in many cases, even more. This means less steel must be produced in the long run. Fewer resources are needed for repairs or maintenance. And fewer deliveries of new parts benefit the environment. It all adds up to improved sustainability. The bottom line is long equipment life saves resources.

Hardox^® wear steel also leads to savings in processing. Its outstanding toughness means it can be bent to form larger structures instead of being welded. This saves resources during production and gives you a stronger product with a long lifespan, again minimizing the amount of steel used over time. And because it has tight tolerances and consistent guaranteed properties, Hardox makes fabrication more reliable and minimizes material waste in production.

The good news is Hardox^® wear steel is a sustainable steel choice you can make right now. When you choose Hardox^® wear steel for your heavy equipment, you’re helping to reduce the environmental impact of steel and of the equipment. Its combination of high strength, hardness and toughness allows you to use less steel to build stronger yet lighter and more resource-efficient equipment that lasts longer.

Read more success stories from customers using Hardox^® wear plate.

How do I accurately calculate wear, service life, payload and savings of upgrading to high-strength steel?

Start by downloading SSAB's free Hardox^® WearCalc app from the Apple Store or Google Play to calculate the increased service life and payload when upgrading to Hardox^® wear plate.

As your equipment takes a pounding every day, you probably wonder how much wear and tear it can take, if you’ve chosen the right materials and steel grades, and whether your plate is worth the investment. With the Hardox^® WearCalc app, you can:

• Calculate sliding wear for different rock types using different grades of Hardox^® wear plate
• Find out the possible weight reduction after upgrading
• Identify payload increase
• Get the service life increase after upgrading
• Save the results and share the report with a friend

EcoUpgraded App

Another must-have steel tool is the EcoUpgraded app, available from the Apple App store or through Google Play. This makes it easy to accurately calculate cost savings of upgrading to high-strength steel.

Through the app, you enter machine type and operational parameters. The app presents a visual report on your estimated savings including:

• Fuel savings over equipment lifetime
• CO₂ savings over equipment lifetime
• CO₂ payback time
• Possible revenue increase

The report is ready in seconds as a colorful, one-page PDF with estimations and infographics. After saving the results, you can share the calculated benefit of the products with your customer, demonstrate "what if" scenarios, and compare it to show your customer the life-cycle benefits.

Is Hardox^® 500 Tuf workshop friendly?

Hardox^® 500 Tuf is reliable and productive in the workshop. It's a clean steel with extremely consistent, guaranteed properties for flatness, thickness and bending performance. Download the Hardox^® steel Guarantees to see how you can ensure predictable fabrication in the workshop.

No additional tooling investment is required because Hardox^® 500 Tuf has the same bending recommendations as Hardox^® 450.

It’s possible to weld the steel using any conventional technique, and no pre-heating is needed up to 16 mm ( 5/8 in.). The same applies for cutting and machining, making the upgrade to Hardox^® 500 Tuf a smooth process. Download the Hardox^® Welding brochure to learn more.

Upgrading to Hardox^® 500 Tuf also results in weight savings and lower press break tonnage.

Consider the additional advantages of Hardox^® 500 Tuf in this a bucket example. Upgrading to Hardox^® 500 Tuf in the shell and sides of a bucket will enable weight savings and production savings due to reduction of unnecessary wear protections. It's easier and faster to weld, has lower total manufacturing costs, increased wear resistance, and allows a considerably higher payload.

With Hardox^® 500 Tuf, you also get less wear on parts, which enables reduction of unnecessary wear protection. And you need fewer parts, which means less cutting and welding, with less weight on the bucket.

Learn more

Discover all the benefits of upgrading to Hardox^® 500 Tuf and examples of many customers who already have converted in this expert-led webinar.

Contact us today to learn more about how you can use Hardox 500^® Tuf to your advantage.