Temperature Fatigue Interaction

This volume contains a selection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the International Conference on Temperature-Fatigue Interaction, held in Paris, May 29-31, 2001, organised by the Fatigue Committee of the Societé Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux (SF2M), under the auspices of the European Structural Integrity Society. The conference disseminated recent research results and promoting the interaction and collaboration amongst materials scientists, mechanical engineers and design engineers. Many engineering components and structures used in the automotive, aerospace, power generation and many other industries experience cyclic mechanical loads at high temperature or temperature transients causing thermally induced stresses. The increase of operating temperature and thermal mechanical loading trigger the interaction with time-dependent phenomena such as creep and environmental effects (oxidation, corrosion). A large number of metallic materials were investigated including aluminium alloys for the automotive industry, steels and cast iron for the automotive industry and materials forming, stainless steels for power plants, titanium, composites, intermetallic alloys and nickel base superalloys for aircraft industry, polymers. Important progress was observed in testing practice for high temperature behaviour, including environment and thermo-mechanical loading as well as in observation techniques. A large problem which was emphasized is to know precisely service loading cycles under non-isothermal conditions. This was considered critical for numerous thermal fatigue problems discussed in this conference.

The global energy consumption is increasing and together with global warming from greenhouse gas emission, create the need for more environmental friendly energy production processes. Higher efficiency of biomass power plants can be achieved by increasing temperature and pressure in the boiler section and this would increase the generation of electricity along with the reduction in emission of greenhouse gases e.g. CO2. The power generation must also be flexible to be able to follow the demands of the energy market, this results in a need for cyclic operating conditions with alternating output and multiple start-ups and shut-downs. Because of the demands of flexibility, higher temperature and higher pressure in the boiler section of future biomass power plants, the demands on improved mechanical properties of the materials of these components are also increased. Properties like creep strength, thermomechanical fatigue resistance and high temperature corrosion resistance are critical for materials used in the next generation biomass power plants. Austenitic stainless steels are known to possess such good high temperature properties and are relatively cheap compared to the nickel-base alloys, which are already operating at high temperature cyclic conditions in other applications. The behaviour of austenitic stainless steels during these widened operating conditions are not yet fully understood. The aim of this licentiate thesis is to increase the knowledge of the mechanical behaviour at high temperature cyclic conditions for austenitic stainless steels. This is done by the use of thermomechanical fatigue- and creepfatigue testing at elevated temperatures. For safety reasons, the effect of prolonged service degradation is investigated by pre-ageing before mechanical testing. Microscopy is used to investigate the microstructural development and resulting damage behaviour of the austenitic stainless steels after testing. The results show that creep-fatigue interaction damage, creep damage and oxidation assisted cracking are present at high temperature cyclic conditions. In addition, simulated service degradation resulted in a detrimental embrittling effect due to the deterioration by the microstructural evolution.