Investigation of Thermopower of Pure Metals and Structural Materials at High Temperatures Aimed to Simulate Electron Beam Welding of Dissimilar Materials

The paper presents the results of measuring the thermopower of pure metals (Ni, W) and industrial alloy steels of austenitic, pearlitic and martensitic classes in the temperature range from 100 to 1000°C. A technique for recording the integral thermopower of a chromel-material-under-investigation thermocouple, mathematical processing of experimental data, and determining the absolute thermopower of the material is described; the temperature dependences of the absolute thermopower coefficient for the materials under study are given. The measurement and data processing technique was verified by comparison with thermopower values obtained in other works on pure metals (Ni and W), and showed good agreement between the results. The results of the work can be used to describe the properties of materials in numerical mathematical simulation of technological processes, for example, electron beam welding of dissimilar materials of large thickness. The results of such simulation and their comparison with the results of a full-scale experiment are presented.