A New Testing Method to Evaluate a Weld Cracking Susceptibility for Stainless Steel Sheets

Abstract

Many testing devices have been developed for the determination of the weld cracking properties of the steels. These are mainly applied to the plate, but a few of them to stainless steel sheets under 3.0 mm in thickness. Meanwhile, the troubles of the cracks transverse to welding direction have frequently occurred in producing welded tubes.
Therefore, authors have designed and used a new method to evaluate a weld cracking susceptibility of stainless steel sheet. Its features are as follows;
1) Welding bead-on-plate with TIG are under tensile load.
2) As susceptibility index, using a critical strain, which is the elongation of just beginning to crack, and is obtained from relationship between the elongation and number of cracks in unit length.
In this paper, firstly, the device has been described in details and secondly, the availability of this method has been shown from the testing results for stainless steels.