Nordic steel company SSAB has introduced Hardox 500 Tuf – its next generation of Hardox wear plate steel for heavy truck tipper bodies, construction equipment buckets and robust containers.
Hardox 500 Tuf has exceptional strength, hardness and toughness, and combines the best properties of both Hardox 450 and Hardox 500 – resulting in a wear plate with no real equivalent on the market.
The steel is tough enough to act as both the contract and structural material in heavy-duty tipper bodies and buckets, and deliver wear and dent resistance under heavy impact – with a Brinell hardness window of 475-505 HBW – for increased service life.
Hardox 500 Tuf has gone through rigorous pre-launch testing in real life applications, including a scenario where it was used to transport 40,000Â tonnes of crushed rock in a year.
Even these conditions resulted in low wear, with subsequent measurements revealing a mere 5% reduction in the thickness of the test trailer’s 6mm bottom plate.
The steel also resists denting and cracking when subject to blows from sharp and heavy objects, and was tested by SSAB using granite to assess the extent of wear.
According to SSAB, Hardox 500 Tuf even delivers an 85% to 100% longer estimated service life compared to its own Hardox 400.
Typical working conditions for a steel such as Hardox 500 Tuf would be the loading and unloading of heavy and sharp rocks in quarries and mines, rebar-strewn concrete in demolition applications, or heavy steel elements in the scrap metal industry.
