The Effect of Heat Treatment on the Hardness and Microstructure of Welded Austenitic Stainless-Steel Type SS 301

Abstract:

In this study, the impact of heat treatment on the hardness and microstructure of welded austenitic stainless-steel type SS301 was investigated in detail. The results obtain from the hardness test using the Mitech 320 Leeb harness tester indicated that the samples after corrosion test were conducted were harder than before in all the heat-treated samples (i.e. normalized, annealed and quenched). This shows that there was some degree of weld decay. The annealed samples however is the best when chosen a soaking time range between 30mins to 300mins. Also it was clearly revealed that the annealed sample had the highest number of average grain size of 9 at a soaking time of 30 mins followed by the normalized sample with 7.5 at soaking time of 180mins and lastly quenched sample with 7.5 at soaking time of 600mins.this clearly After the heat treatment and microstructure evaluation, it was obvious that the annealed SS301 sample had the highest average grain size number in almost all the soaking time periods, thus had finer grains which agrees with ASTM G59, showing an even distribution of grains on the microstructure of the annealed sample.

Keywords — Annealed, Austenitic Stainless Steel, Heat treatment, Microstructure