Influence of Multi-Thermal Cycle and Constraint Condition on Residual Stress in P92 Steel Weldment

P92 steel is a typical 9%similar to 12% Cr ferrite heat-resistant steel with good high temperature creep resistance, relatively low linear expansion coefficient and excellent corrosion resistance, so it is one of important structural materials used in supercritical thermal power plants. Fusion welding technology has been widely used to assemble the parts in thermal power plant. When the supercritical unit is in service, its parts are constantly subjected to combination of tensile, bending, twisting and impact loads under high temperature and high pressure, and many problems such as creep, fatigue and brittle fracture often occur. It has been recognized that welding residual stress has a significant impact on creep, fatigue and brittle fracture, so it is necessary to study the residual stress of P92 steel welded joints. The evolution and formation mechanism of welding residual stress in P92 steel joints under multiple thermal cycles were investigated in this work. Based on SYSWELD software, a computational approach considering the couplings among thermal, microstructure and mechanics was developed to simulate welding residual stress in P92 steel joints. Using the developed computational tool, the evolution of residual stress in Satoh test specimens was studied, and welding residual stress distribution in double-pass welded joints was calculated. In the numerical models, the influences of volume change, yield strength variation and plasticity induced by phase transformation on welding residual stress were taken into account in details. Meanwhile, the hole-drilling method and XRD method were employed to measure the residual stress distribution in the double-pass welded joints. The simulated results match the experimental measurements well, and the comparison between measurements and predictions suggests that the computational approach developed by the current study can more accurately predict welding residual stress in multi-pass P92 steel joints. The simulated results show that the longitudinal residual stress distribution around the fusion zone has a clear tension-compression pattern. Compressive longitudinal residual stresses generated in the fusion zone and heat affected-zone (HAZ) in each pass, while tensile stresses produced near the HAZs. In addition, the numerical simulation also suggests that the transverse constraint has a large influence on the transverse residual stress, while it has an insignificant effect on the longitudinal residual stress.