Additive manufacturing of metallic components – Process, structure and properties

Recent advances in friction-stir welding : Process, weldment structure and properties

Our safety, comfort and peace of mind are heavily dependent upon our capability to prevent, predict or postpone the failure of components and structures on the basis of sound physical principles While the external loadings acting on a material or component are clearly important, There are other contributory factors including unfavourable materials microstructure, pre-existing defects and residual stresses Residual stresses can add to, or subtract from, the applied stresses and so when unexpected failure occurs it is often because residual stresses have combined critically with the applied stresses, or because together with the presence of undetected defects they have dangerously lowered the applied stress at which failure will occur Consequently it is important that the origins of residual stress are understood, opportunities for removing harmful or introducing beneficial residual stresses recognized, their evolution in-service predicted, their influence on failure processes understood and safe structural integrity assessments made, so as to either remove the part prior to failure, or to take corrective action to extend life This paper reviews the progress in these aspects in the light of the basic failure mechanisms

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Residual stress and its role in failure

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1088/1468-6996/9/1/013002

Precipitate design for creep strengthening of 9% Cr tempered martensitic steel for ultra-supercritical power plants

ASME boiler and pressure vessel codeの許容応力の改訂

There have been concerted world wide efforts to develop steels suitable for use in efficient fossil fired power plants. Ferritic alloys containing between 9 and 12 wt-% chromium are seen as the most promising materials in this respect, especially for thick walled components such as headers and the main steam pipe in boilers. However, the performance of the improved steels has often not been realised in service, because premature failures occur in the heat affected zone of welded joints in a phenomenon referred to as type IV cracking. This review assesses the relationship between the composition and microstructure of 9–12 Cr steels, the welding and fabrication procedures and how these factors translate into a propensity for type IV failures.

Type IV cracking in ferritic power plant steels

Many of the degradation mechanisms relevant to power plant components can be exacerbated by stresses that reside within the material. Good design or structural integrity assessments require therefore, an accounting of residual stresses, which often are introduced during welding. To do this it is necessary to characterise the stresses, but this may not be possible in thick components using non-destructive methods. These difficulties, and a paucity of relevant engineering data, have led to an increasing emphasis on the development and validation of suitable modelling tools. Advances are prominent in the estimation of welding residual stresses in austenitic stainless steels. The progress has been less convincing in the case of ferritic alloys, largely due to the complexities associated with the solid state phase transformations that occur in multipass welding. We review here the metallurgical issues that arise in ferritic steel welds, relate these to the difficulties in calculating residual stresses,...

Welding Residual Stresses in Ferritic Power Plant Steels

Weld residual stresses often approach, or exceed, the yield strength of the material, with serious implications for the integrity of engineering structures. It is not always feasible to measure residual stresses, so integrity assessments often rely heavily on numerical models. In ferritic steels, the credibility of such models depends on their ability to account for solid-state phase transformations, which can have a controlling effect on the final residual stress state. Furthermore, a better understanding of weld transformations provides an opportunity to engineer the weld stress state and microstructure for improved life. In this article, the complementary merits of synchrotron X-ray and neutron diffraction are exploited both to verify and refine weld models and to inspire the development of weld filler metals to control weld stresses. In terms of weld filler metal design, X-ray diffraction is used to characterize phase transformations in real time during realistic weld cooling cycles, for understanding small-scale behavior and identifying features that need to be incorporated into finite-element models. Meanwhile, neutron diffraction is used to elucidate the practical consequences of solid-state phase transformations on the macroscopic scale, thereby providing crucial validatory structural integrity data.

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Characterizing Phase Transformations and Their Effects on Ferritic Weld Residual Stresses with X-Rays and Neutrons

In this study the residual stresses in a pipe girth weld in a ferritic-martensitic power plant steel were measured by neutron diffraction and compared with the corresponding metallurgical zones in the weld region. It was found that, in both the as-welded and post-weld heat treated condition, the highest tensile stresses resided near the outer boundary of the heat-affected zone (HAZ), and towards the weld root region. Substantial tensile direct and hydrostatic stresses existed across the HAZ, including the fine-grained and intercritically annealed regions, where premature type IV creep failures manifest in 9–12 Cr steel welds. Compressive stresses were found in the weld metal coinciding with the last weld bead to be deposited. Constrained cooling tests on test coupons illustrated that these compressive stresses can be explained in terms of the influence that solid-state phase transformations have on the accumulation of stress in welds.

John Francis

Papers

Type IV cracking in ferritic power plant steels

Welding Residual Stresses in Ferritic Power Plant Steels

Characterizing Phase Transformations and Their Effects on Ferritic Weld Residual Stresses with X-Rays and Neutrons

Residual stress distributions in a P91 steel-pipe girth weld before and after post weld heat treatment

Microstructure and mechanical properties of laser welded S960 high strength steel