Facilitating the Identification of the Soft Zone in a 1.25Cr-0.5Mo Heat-Resistant Steel

A novel technique, by implementing a well-designed simulated welding, is proposed to precisely locate the soft zone. We capture and demonstrate that essential factors, including hardness profiles, geometrical dimension, microstructures, and elemental distributions, could enable fair comparison of key heat-affected zone sub-regions between actual and simulated welding samples. It is found that the width of the heat-affected zone has been expanded approximately 3 times, which will unambiguously facilitate the identification of the elusive soft zone.