Characterization of creep resistance for local structure of power plant weldment using SP-Creep technique

Power plant weldments are composed of various microstructures. Due to welding and PWHT processes, the microstructure of the base metal adjacent to fusion line is transformed into entirely different microstructures, collectively known as heat affected zone (HAZ). Creep, on the other hand, is considered as the most important deterioration mechanism of heat resistant components found in power plants. Therefore it is essential to evaluate creep properties of HAZ, which is considered to be very hazardous in weldment. Recently, most of the creep tests for HAZ are conducted using cross weld type specimen. However there are some problems with this type of creep test due to the results being largely varied according to the volume fraction of HAZ. In this paper, SP-Creep test, which has confirmed the availability for creep properties evaluation, has been conducted on each of the weldment microstructures. The results showed that each microstructure has a different creep behavior. The overall creep properties of HAZ are worse than those of the weld metal. Among the HAZ structures, fine grained HAZ has the worst creep properties.