Improved Mechanical Properties of the A 508 Class 3 Steel for Nuclear Pressure Vessel Through Steelmaking

Abstract

The present work is concerned with the steelmaking practices which improve the mechanical properties of the A 508 class 3 steel for reactor pressure vessel. Three kinds of steelmaking practices were applied to manufacture the forged heavy wall shell for reactor pressure vessel, that is, the vacuum carbon deoxidation(VCD), modified VCD containing aluminum and silicon-killing. The segregation of the chemical elements through the thickness was quite small so that the variations of the tensile properties at room temperature were small and the anisotropy of the impact properties was hardly observed regardless of the steelmaking practices. The Charpy V-notch impact properties and the reference nil-ductile transition temperature by drop weight test were significantly improved by the modified VCD and silicon-killing as compared with those of the steel by VCD. Moreover, the plane strain fracture toughness values of the materials by modified VCD and silicon-killing practices was much higher than those of the steel by VCD. These were resulted from the fining of austenite grain size. It was observed that the grain size was below 20μm (ASTM No. 8.5) when using the modified VCD and silicon-killing,compared to 50μm (ASTM No. 7.0)when using VCD.