Reheat Cracking in Welds, Mechanisms andMitigation Strategies

The characteristic features, mechanisms of formation and mitigationstrategies of reheat cracking in high temperature austenitic alloys aredescribed. From the literature review it appears that there is a significantresearch effort being spent on this topic for ferritic steels for pressurevessels and power plant applications. However, the problem of reheatcracking in high temperature austenitic components is not yet completelyunderstood and many industries are still suffering from early failures due tolack of fundamental knowledge of this failure. In many cases reheatcracking is mistaken with creep damage, due to some similarities betweenthese two failures. In this talk, reheat cracking, its characteristic featuresand its correlation with the microstructure and welding parameters areintroduced. The ways this failure can be prevented in different installationsare discussed and some examples are given