Search

The intergranular cracks and grain boundary (GB) network of a GB-engineered 316 stainless steel after stress corrosion cracking (SCC) test in high temperature high pressure water of reactor environment were investigated by two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) characterization in order to expose the mechanism that GB-engineering mitigates intergranular SCC. The 3D microstructure shown that the essential characteristic of the GB-engineered microstructure is formation of many large twin-boundaries as a result of multiple-twinning, which results in the formation of large grain-clusters. The large grain-clusters played a key role to the improvement of intergranular SCC resistance by GB-engineering. The main intergranular cracks propagated in a zigzag along the outer boundaries of these large grain-clusters because all inner boundaries of the grain-clusters were twin-boundaries (∑3) or twin-related boundaries (∑3 n ) which had much lower susceptibility to SCC than random boundaries. These large grain-clusters had tree-ring-shaped topology structure and very complex morphology. They got tangled so that difficult to be separated during SCC, resulting in some large crack-bridges retained in the crack surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corrosion behavior of oilfield used L245N standard steel was tested in simulated oilfield solution by dynamic high-temperature autoclave. The corrosion products were characterized by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) respectively. In addition, the corrosion rates and surface morphological characteristics of the steels after different exposure times were studied. The results showed that the corrosion rate decreased sharply and then increased with time in the high salinity flow solution, which was related to the formation of corrosion scale and the remaining cementite within it. At the beginning of the exposure time, the formed corrosion scale became thicker, resulting in a significant decrease of the corrosion rate. While with increasing time, on the one hand, the increased remaining cementite within corrosion scale facilitated the corrosion by the galvanic corrosion between the remaining cementite and the ferrite within the metal. On the other hand, the protective effect of corrosion scale formed on the remaining cementite skeleton declined due to the formation of large amounts of FexCa1−xCO3, which also promoted the corrosion rate of the steels, both these ways contributed to a slow increase of corrosion rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]