Stress-corrosion crack initiation behavior of carbon steel in simulated BWR environment

Carbon steels and low-alloy steels are said to possess, even though susceptible to stress-corrosion cracking themselves, conspicuously longer life than weld-sensitized Type 304 stainless steels in actual boiling water reactor (BWR) primary coolant environments of high-temperature, high-purity water containing some dissolved oxygen. This has been examined for a carbon steel pipe material and its weld by conducting uniaxial constant-load tests as a laboratory accelerated test. By statistically analyzing the distribution of stress-corrosion cracking lifetimes and metallographical examining the features of stress-corrosion crack initiation in an SEM, following results have been obtained: (1) the stress-corrosion cracking lifetime obeys the exponential distribution model; (2) stress-corrosion cracks are initiated at the bottom of corrosion pits, and it appears possible to analyze their initiation conditions in terms of stress-intensity calculated regarding the pit as a sharp crack; (3) the microcracks as initiated at the corrosion pit are non-propagative per se, so that it is only when they have grown into a main crack by coalescence with nearby microcracks that steady propagation becomes possible; and (4) both the process of pit initiation and that of microcrack coalescence can be described as a Poisson stochastic process just as for the stainless steels in the same environment,more » so that the whole process of stress-corrosion crack initiation can be conceived as consisting of these two independent Poisson stochastic processes connected in serial succession.« less