The subject of the paper is the influence of heat treatment on the properties of selected materials used for the production of bearing rings. Structurally, bearings are a very important element in machinery, they are very susceptible to the purity of the material as well as to the purity of the operating environment. Their role is to connect the surrounding components and transfer the fixed motion to the rotary motion. The hardened layers on the evaluated samples are made under identical equipment setup while keeping the parameters constant. The materials compared are influenced by the heat treatment parameters, which were uniform for all selected materials. A variable factor is the material composition of the different types of bearing steels. The experimental part is aimed at investigating and evaluating the influence of the parameters on the structural properties of the evaluated and compared materials. This includes the identification and characterization of the microstructures in the cloudy layers as well as in the core of the individual materials. Verification of the correctness of the microstructure determination is the comparison and graphical representation of the resulting HV5 hardness waveforms measured on selected materials processed by surface hardening.

Acknowledgement: This research work has been supported by the by the project: Advancement and support of R&D for "Centre for diagnostics and quality testing of materials" in the domains of the RIS3 SK specialization, Acronym: CEDITEK II., ITMS2014+ code 313011W442.