Failure Analysis of Stainless Steel Heat Exchange Tube

Some 0Cr18Ni10Ti stainless steel heat exchange tubes of a heat exchanger in a chemical plant cracked. In order to find out the causes of failure, the chemical composition, hardness, metallography, fracture morphology and corrosion products of the cracked tubes were analyzed. The reason for cracking of the heat exchange tubes was that the residual stress in the tubes after processing was large, and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) occurred in chloride ion environment.