Pierre-Antony Deschênes

• Researcher at Hydro-Québec

Low-carbon martensitic stainless steels, such as 13%Cr4%Ni, are widely used in manufacturing hydraulic turbine runners. High tensile strength steel, such as cast CA6NM or wrought S41500 martensitic stainless steel, has an acceptable resistance to corrosion and cavitation, and reduces the weight and cost while offering a more efficient design. Durin...

The existence of cracks within ductile materials such as stainless steel induces local plasticity around the crack tip that may cause local changes in the microstructure. Although the plastic deformation and microstructural heterogeneities are expected to influence the electrochemistry of the area around the crack tip, few are the studies that corr...

Hydraulic turbine blades are exposed to cyclic loading which favors formation and propagation of fatigue cracks. Due to different in-service loading regimes, the crack tip is subjected to a range of strain rates. The present study proposes an experimental investigation of the mechanical properties of a 13%Cr-4%Ni martensitic stainless steel at stra...

This paper presents a detailed experimental approach to extract the critical resolved shear stress (CRSS) and the saturation stress of the elementary constituents of the microstructure of quenched S41500 martensitic stainless steel by conducting various microscopy observations and microtensile testing. To the authors' knowledge, the direct extracti...

This paper presents a study on the influence of welding residual stresses (RS) on fatigue crack propagation rate (FCPR). The objective of this work is to develop a novel methodology that allows a variation of a RS field in the studied specimen while keeping constant all other variables influencing FCPR. This led to the development of a novel specim...