A Study on the High Frequency Ultrasonic Attenuation Characterization in Artificially Aging Degraded 2.25Cr-1Mo Steel

The destructive method is reliable and widely used lot the estimation of material degradation but, it have time-consuming and a great difficulty in preparing specimens from in-service industrial facilities. Therefore, the estimation of degraded structural materials used at high temperature by nondestructive evaluation such as electric resistance method, replica method, Barkhausen noise method, electro-chemical method and ultrasonic method are strongly desired. Ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation technique has been reported good to attain efficiency of measurement, high sensitivity of measurement, and rapidity and reliability of result interpretation. In this study, it was verified experimentally the feasibility of the evaluation of degraded 2.25Cr-1Mo steel specimens which were prepared by the isothermal aging heat treatment at 630 .deg. C by high frequency longitudinal wave method investigating the change of attenuation coefficient by FFT analysis and wavelet transform. Because of carbide precipitation increase and spheroidization near grain boundary of microstructure to aging degradation, attenuation coefficient had a tendency to increase as degradation proceeded. It was identified possibly to evaluate degradation using the characteristics of high-frequency ultrasonics. Frequency dependence of ultrasonic attenuation coefficient to aging degradation appeared large, which made sure that attenuation coefficient is an important parameter for evaluation of aging degradation