Research on microstructure and mechanical properties of explosively welded stainless steel/commercially pure Ti plate

Abstract

Surface protection by the application of explosive welding is one of the meaningful methods used in many chemical devices like reactor condensers, heat exchangers, steam turbines and other processing apparatus. Due to the wide range of explosively welded applications, the problem of the useful lifetime of the products obtained by this method becomes important and should be well understood. Process of explosive welding is related to enormous pressure and high detonation velocity, which causes intense energy release in a short time, which favors to produce solid wavy bond featured with high metallurgical quality. Due to strain hardening in the bond zone, significant changes in microstructures and mechanical properties were observed. In this paper, 316L stainless steel explosively welded with commercially pure titanium was investigated to show the correlations and changes between microstructures and mechanical properties before and after annealing. Application of post-weld heat treatment contributes to stress relieving and improves the mechanical properties, which is closely related to microstructure recrystallization and hardness decrease adjacent to joint.