Thermal Degradation Evaluation of HP40Nb Alloy Steel After Long Term Service Using a Nonlinear Ultrasonic Technique.

Nonlinear ultrasonic analysis has been proposed to characterize the thermal degradation of HP40Nb steel associated with microstructure evolution. Measurements of ultrasonic nonlinear signals were performed in the thermally degraded damaged HP40Nb specimens and the results showed a clear change of increase-plateau-decrease tendency of the normalized nonlinear parameter with respect to the different thermal loading time. Based on metallographic studies, the variation in the measured acoustic nonlinearity reveals that the normalized acoustic nonlinearity increases due to the increases of the second phase precipitates and dislocation density in the early stage and it decreases as a combined result of the reduction of dislocation density, coarsening of precipitates and initiation of micro-voids after long-term high temperature exposure. Moreover, an analytical model calculation of precipitate-dislocation interaction has been performed to interpret the correlation between microstructural evolutions and the measured ultrasonic nonlinearity. Consequently, ultrasonic nonlinearity is found to be strongly sensitive to the microstructure evolutions during thermal degradation of HP40Nb steels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]