Failure analysis of HP40 steel tubes utilized in steam reformer units of petroleum refinery plants

This work is focused on the failure analysis of a HP40 steel tube used in steam reformer units, which was operated at about 850 °C for 100000 h. The failure analysis was conducted experimentally and numerically using the Thermo-Calc software. The main results indicated that the failed tube presented slightly different contents of Ni and Cr from the nominal ones, which originated the absence of the interdendritic eutectic microconstituent, composed of austenite and M7C3 carbides. This fact was also corroborated by Thermo-Calc results. This absence of eutectic facilitates the crack propagation on the dendritic zones and then the trangranular brittle fracture propagation through the austenite dendritic zones.