Estimating inclusion content in high performance steels

Abstract: Non-metallic inclusions in steel pose a major problem for the fatigue resistance, especially regarding fatigue at very long lives corresponding to low cyclic stress levels, as well as being detrimental to material toughness and polishability.The largest inclusions are quite rare, which makes conventional detection methods timeconsuming if reliable results are to be obtained. Based on surface scanning using light or electron microscopes, these methods provide results that have to be converted to reflect the statistical volume distribution of inclusions.Very high cycle fatigue (in the order of 109 cycles or more) using ultrasonic fatigue at 20 kHz has been found efficient at finding the largest inclusions in volumes of about 300 mm3 per specimen. The inclusions found at the fatigue initiation site can then been used to estimate the distribution of large inclusions using extreme value statistics.In this work, a new method for estimating the volume distribution of large inclusions is presented as well as a suggested ranking variable based on the volume distribution.Results from fatigue fractography and area scanning methods are compared to the endurance limit at 109 cycles for a number of batches from two high performance steels.In addition, the extreme value distributions of fatigue initiating inclusions in six high performace steels, produced by different routes, are presented. It is shown that all modes of the Generalized Extreme Values distribution can be found in different materials. This result shows that the assumption of mode I distribution, also known as Gumbel or Largest Extreme Value distribution, must be substantiated.