Mitigating environmental assisted cracking in heterogeneous welds by laser peening without coating

• LSP was used to plastically deform weld joint to impart compressive residual stress. • the treatment was applied underwater on hard-to-reach area inside of a narrow tube. • the lifetime of environmentally assisted cracking was extended 2.5x. • the fatigue life was extended more than 8x. In this work Laser Peening without Coating (LPwC) was applied underwater on heterogeneous weld joint made of P265GH and X6CrNiTi18-10 steel tubes to prevent Environmental Assisted Cracking on the weld/P265GH steel fusion boundary. Special laser head was designed to precisely deliver 200 mJ green laser beam on the centrally located weld interface on the inner surface of a pipe 76 mm wide and 420 mm long. Residual stress analysis revealed that the LPwC treatment led to generation of compressive residual stresses in the critical fusion boundary area with the magnitude of −168 MPa despite the absence of a protective layer in the peening process. The depth of compressive stresses reached up to 0.8 mm. Plastic deformation induced by LPwC led to grain refinement in the microstructure and improved hardness by 16 %. Samples sectioned from the treated pipe were subjected to accelerated corrosion-mechanical testing which showed more than 2.5x increase in cycles to failure after LPwC. Fractography analysis showed shorter length and decreased number of corrosion cracks after LPwC as well as formation of protective oxide layer on top of the treated surface. 3-point bend testing further showed more than 8x increase in corrosion fatigue life.