Effect of Heat Treatment on Low Temperature Toughness of Reduced Pressure Electron Beam Weld Metal of Type 316L Stainless Steel

Austenitic stainless steels are considered to be the candidate materials for liquid hydrogen vessels and the related equipments, and those welding parts that require high toughness at cryogenic temperature. The authors have found that the weld metal of Type 316L stainless steel processed by reduced pressure electron beam (RPEB) welding has high toughness at cryogenic temperature, which is considered to be due to the single-pass welding process without reheating effect accompanied by multi-pass welding process.In this work, the effect of heat treatment on low temperature toughness of the RPEB weld metal of Type 316L was investigated by Charpy impact test at 77K. The absorbed energy decreased with higher temperature and longer holding time of heat treatment. The remarkable drop in the absorbed energy was found with heat treatment at 1073K for 2 hours, which is as low as that of conventional multi-pass weld metal such as tungsten inert gas welding. The observations of fracture surface and microstructure revealed that the decrease in the absorbed energy with heat treatment resulted from the precipitation of intermetallic compounds near delta-ferrite phase