Creep behavior of 2.25Cr-1Mo steel shield metal arc weldment

In order to guarantee the safety of high temperature components and prevent unscheduled outage, remnant life assessment for creep is quite important. The experiences in actual components reveal that almost all the problems relating to creep are generated at the weldment, which contains microstructures with different creep properties from those presumed in the parent material. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that a terminal failure mode of low alloy ferritic steels or tempered martensitic steels become Type IV, taking place at the Intercritical HAZ or Fine Grained HAZ. However, in the present work using 2.25Cr-1 Mo steel welds fabricated with basic coated Shield Metal Arc Weld (SMAW) consumables, the most prevalent failure mode was Type I in the center of weld metal rather than Type IV. And this tendency was more pronounced at low stresses, suggesting the possibility of Type I cracking in actual components. It was concluded that poor creep strength of 2.25Cr-1 Mo weld metal was ascribed to its fully bainitic microstructure in which carbides evolution was accelerated and M2C depletion took place earlier than base metal.