Investigation of Potential Material Inhomogeneity in the Magnetically Detected Neutron-Irradiation-Generated Structural Degradation of Nuclear Reactor Pressure Vessel Steel

A novel nondestructive method called magnetic adaptive testing has been previously applied to detect the neutron-irradiation-generated structural changes in reactor pressure vessel steel material. This method has been found to be a useful tool for this purpose, and good correlation—as a tendency—has been found between the estimated ductile-to-brittle transition temperature and magnetic parameters. However, a significant scattering of measured points was also observed for the investigated set of Charpy specimens. The main result of the work was that by magnetic selection of samples, the scatter can be notably reduced. As a conclusion, the magnetically measured parameters seemed to be precise and reliable for the detection of embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel steel, with lower scattering of points than in the conventionally used destructive mechanical characteristics (ductile-to-brittle transition temperature). This result is surprising and needs further verification. The purpose of the present work is to repeat the measurement on irradiated reactor steel blocks. In this work, instead of the DBTT transition temperature, individually measured Vickers hardness (VH) data were used to help characterize the mechanical properties of the material. The so-called “property transformation” is a known and applied technique in the nuclear industry. The mechanical property characterized by the transition temperature cannot be determined individually for each specimen; instead, it can be obtained only on a set of samples by statistical fitting. Therefore, the individually measured Vickers hardness values can be utilized in order to predict the individual transition temperature values by the help of the property transformation technique. In this paper, however, not these derived transition temperature values, but their origins, the Vickers hardness values, are studied in a direct manner. The same behavior of blocks was observed as in the case of Charpy specimens, which is considered to validate the previously published results. As a possible reason for the scattering of points, large magnetic inhomogeneity of samples cut even from the same block was also proved. The magnetic parameters and Vickers hardness correlate well with each other. This result justifies the potential future application of magnetic techniques in practice aimed at the regular inspection of nuclear reactors.