Precipitation behavior in F82H during heat treatments of blanket fabrication

Sakasegawa, Hideo   ; Tanigawa, Hiroyasu; Kano, Sho; Enomoto, Masato*

Reduced Activation Ferritic/Martensitic steels (RAFMs) are leading candidates for the structural material of DEMO blanket module. Through the Broader Approach (BA) activity in Japan, the fabrication techniques for the DEMO blanket module has been studied and developed. In the techniques, the development of joining technique is especially important for fabricating the complicated structure of blanket module. In particular, Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) has been applied to joining cooling channels with a rectangular cross section. During and after HIP, the structural material are exposed to various heat treatments such as holding at the HIP temperature, following furnace cooling, 2nd normalizing to refine austenite grains, and 2nd tempering. Microstructural evolutions during these various heat treatments should be focused, because they determine the performance of the blanket module. Especially, fine precipitates such as tantalum and vanadium carbides precipitated at high temperatures greatly affect the creep property, the material toughness, and irradiation resistances of RAF as the structural material. In this work, we have studied the stability of fine precipitates in the F82H-BA07 heat (8Cr-2W-V, Ta) during simulated heat treatments of the blanket fabrication.