Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Welded Joint of a Fe-Cr-Ni-Mo Steel with High-Strength and High-Toughness

High-strength steel has the advantages of high strength, low cost and good hot and cold workability, etc., which is widely used in various fields of national economy as engineering steel, such as bridge, vehicle, ship, pressure vessel and so on. As increasing strength, the plasticity and toughness of high strength steel have not meet the demand in some industrial areas, especially the low temperature impact toughness. Recently, a Fe-Cr-Ni-Mo steel with high-strength and high-toughness has been developed and has been successfully used to prepare high pressure vessels. In this work, metal active gas (MAG) welding with multi-pass welding was used to join a Fe-Cr-Ni-Mo high-strength and high-toughness steel. The microstructure and fracture morphologies of welded joint are investigated by SEM, EPMA and TEM and the micro-hardness, tensile strength and Charpy impact energy are tested as well. The results show that the morphologies of welded metal (WM) consist of columnar crystal (CC) and equiaxed crystal (EC), where the upper WM is predominantly CC and the proportion of EC increases in the lower WM. The microstructure of upper WM is tempered martensite for the faster cooling rate. Because the higher content of alloying elements in lower WM improves the hardening tendencies, the lower WM is granular bainite. The heat affected zone near WM is coarsen martensite and has the highest hardness (621 HV), which is significantly higher than that of the base metal (BM) (410 HV). The hardness of the upper WM is 365 HV, which is lower than that of BM and the lower WM has higher hardness (450 HV). Therefore, the upper tensile sample of welded joint was broken in the WM and the fracture strength is 1109 MPa and lower than that of BM (1190 MPa). While the fracture position of lower tensile sample is in the BM and the strength is about 1183 MPa. The welded joint of experimental Fe-Cr-Ni-Mo steel has higher strength and the welding factor is not lower than 0.93. Moreover, the impact energy of WM is 53 J.