Effect of cold working on crack growth rate of environmentally assisted cracking of 316L SS

Abstract

Environmentally assisted cracking (EAC) is a main failure mode of key structural materials of nuclear power pressure vessels and pipelines in service. The key structural materials of nuclear power will undergo plastic deformation due to cold working during manufacturing, assembly and welding, and cold working will affect the EAC crack growth rate. In order to understand effect of cold working on crack growth rate of EAC, a combination of theory, experiment and finite element simulation is used. There are experiments to obtain the mechanical properties of 316L stainless steel at different degrees of cold working, and the creep characteristics of 316L stainless steel at low temperature and high stress were obtained by experiment. Based on experiment and theoretical analysis, creep rate of crack tip is used to replace strain rate of crack tip in Ford-Andresen model, and effect of cold working on crack growth rate of EAC is analyzed with hardening at crack tip and without hardening at crack tip. The results show that cold working accelerates crack growth rate of EAC, and the hardening of crack tip micro zone restrains crack growth rate of EAC, causing the “hysteresis” phenomenon in the EAC crack growth process. It is more reasonable to use creep rate of crack tip instead of strain rate of crack tip to calculate crack growth rate of EAC.