Abstract
Needless to say, it is important to estimate the stress applied to a material when conducting failure analysis. In recent years, a material assessment method using electron back-scatter diffraction (EBSD) has been developed. It has been reported that a characteristic misorientation distribution corresponding to the fracture mode is seen in cross-sectional EBSD observation near the fracture surface of a Ni-based superalloy. Furthermore, the authors discovered EBSD striations on the crack cross-section, which is formed with each fatigue crack growth during a turbine shut-down process. This was discovered in misorientation analysis on a single-crystal superalloy blade used in a commercial land-based gas turbine. Since Ni-based superalloys have high deformation resistance, they do not undergo enough ductile deformation to form striations at the crack tip on the fracture surface during fatigue crack growth, and, as a result, striations corresponding to cyclic loadings are rarely observed in fractography. Even in such a Ni-based superalloy with brittle crack growth, the fatigue crack growth rate and the applied stress can be estimated by measuring EBSD striation spacing in misorientation analysis.
However, a practical problem in assessment is that the resolution limit fixed with field emission scanning electron microscopes (FE-SEM) determine the range in which crack growth rate can be assessed. Hence, it is difficult to clearly discriminate the EBSD striations when the fatigue crack growth rate is too low, such as in the low stress intensity factor range (ΔK) region.
The applied stress can be calculated from ΔK. Therefore, in this paper, in order to estimate the applied stress during fatigue crack growth, we focused on estimating ΔK by measuring the plastic zone size along the crack growth.
