Prof. Bin Yang
30 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District
Beijing 100083, China
Tel. & Fax: +86-10-62333351
E-mail: byang@ustb.edu.cn
Dear Youshi Hong Editor,
We are pleased to submit the manuscript, “Fatigue property of
SA508-ІV steel with different microstructures for a novel nuclear
reactor pressure vessels” by Xin Dai, Yuefeng Chen and Bin Yang for
your kind consideration and possible publication as an article inFatigue &Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures .
The low cycle fatigue behavior of SA508-IV steel with different
microstructures had been investigated. The fatigue test of the specimens
with different microstructures were performed under the strain
amplitudes of ±0.45% and ±0.6% at 300 °C, respectively. The
experimental results showed that the fatigue life of martensite was much
longer than that of granular bainite at the same strain amplitude, which
might be attributed to four reasons: Firstly, the stress concentration
between the M/A islands and bainitic ferrite matrix was easy to cause
crack initiation. Secondly, the crack propagation of granular bainite
was higher than that of martensite, which result in shorter fatigue
life. Thirdly, the HAGBs volume fraction of martensite was much longer
than that of granular bainite and the HAGBs could effectively hinder
crack propagation. Finally, there were more carbides in martensite than
in granular bainite and the carbides could effectively hinder crack
propagation. Therefore, the fatigue life of martensite was much longer
than that of granular bainite. And this paper provides reference data
for the fatigue behavior of a novel reactor pressure vessel.
The work described in this paper is
original. The manuscript, or its contents in some other form, has not
been published previously by any of the authors and/or is under
consideration for publication in another journal at the time of
submission.
Thank you very much for your kind consideration.
Sincerely yours,