Effect of grain orientation and boundary distributions on hydrogen-induced cracking in low-carbon-content steels

Abstract

Hydrogen-induced cracking (HIC) causes considerable economic losses in a wide range of steels exposed to corrosive environments. The effect of crystallographic texture and grain boundary distributions tailored by rolling at 850 C in three different steels with a body-centered cube structure was investigated on HIC resistance. The x-ray and electron backscattered diffraction techniques were used to characterize texture evolutions during the rolling process. The findings revealed a significant improvement against HIC based on texture engineering. In addition, increasing the number of {111} and {110} grains, associated with minimizing the number of {001} grains in warmrolled samples, reduced HIC susceptibility. Moreover, the results showed that boundaries associated with low {hkl} indexing and denser packing planes had more resistance against crack propagation.