6. Conclusion

In today's context of increased productivity demanded of tooling in many areas of product processing, this guide is an aid to choosing the most appropriate steel grade, heat treatment and surface treatment. The different types of annealing, quenching and tempering methods, as well as residual stress-relieving treatments, have been reviewed. The same was true of the various thermochemical treatments, surface heat treatments and coatings carried out by liquid or dry processes. Special mention was made of nanopeening, a recently developed treatment for surface nanostructuring that holds great promise in the field of hot-work tooling.

Incidents during heat treatment, and in particular excessive deformation and breakage after quenching, were analyzed in detail, with a description of the main remedies used to avoid them. In this field, the very significant contribution...