Creep Strength Evaluation of a New and a Used Grade 91 Welded Joints by Using a Miniature Specimen

Abstract

Grade 91 is widely used for steam pipes and tubes in high temperature boilers of ultra-super critical power plants in Japan. It was reported that creep damage may initiate at the fine grain region within the heat affected zone (HAZ) in welded joints prior to the base metal, so called “Type IV” damage, which causes steam leakage in existing power plants. Therefore, development of creep damage assessment methods is not only an important but also an urgent subject to maintain operation reliability. In order to evaluate creep damage of welded joints based on finite element analyses, creep deformation properties of a base metal, a weld metal and a HAZ have to be obtained from creep tests. However, it is difficult to cut a standard size creep specimen from the HAZ region. Only a miniature size specimen is available from the narrow HAZ region. Therefore, development of creep testing and evaluation technique for miniature size specimens is highly expected. In this study, a miniature tensile type solid bar specimen with 1mm diameter was machined from a base metal, a weld metal and a HAZ of a new and a used Grade 91 welded joints, and creep tests of these miniature specimens were conducted by using a special developed creep testing machine. It was found that creep deformation property is almost identical between the base metal and weld metal, and creep strain rate of the HAZ is much faster than that of these metals in the new welded joint. Relationships between stress and creep strain rates of the base metal and the HAZ in the used welded joint are within scatter bands of those in the new material. On the other hand, creep strain rate of the weld metal in the used welded joint became much faster than that in the new one. Then both the standard size and the miniature size cross weld specimens were machined from the new and the used welded joints and were tested under the same temperature and stress conditions. Rupture time of the miniature cross weld specimen is much shorter than that of the standard size cross weld specimen. The finite element creep analysis of the specimens indicates that higher triaxiality stress yields within the HAZ of the standard size specimen than that of the miniature specimen causing faster creep strain rate in the HAZ of the miniature cross weld specimen.