Microstructural control of ductile crack propagation in TMCP HSLA pipeline steels

Control of ductile fracture propagation is one of the major concerns for pipeline industry, particularly with the increasing demand of new control rolled steel grades required to maintain integrity at high operational pressures. The objective of this research is to understand which microstructural features govern crack propagation, and to analyse the effect of two of them (average grain size, and volume fraction of pearlite). The main disadvantage during classical Charpy test was to discriminate the crack initiation and propagation energy during fracture of a notched sample. The initiation appears to be caused by the stress state in the neighbouring of Ti-containing precipitates or pearlite particles (no presence of M/A constituents or MnS inclusions was detected in the evaluated grades), propagation-arrest of the crack is assumed to play the main role concerning the control of fracture. Our approach to characterize the fracture resistance is to measure the energy absorbed during the crack propagation stage by means of load-displacement curves obtained via instrumented Charpy test. It was observed that the energy absorbed during crack propagation is not influenced by the average grain size but by the fraction and the morphological (banded-not banded) distribution of second pearlitic phase. This suggests that a different approach to characterize the heterogeneities in grain size clustering might be followed to correlate the energy measured during crack propagation and the morphological features of the steel