Credit: ORNL/Genevieve Martin
A sample of welded 2-inch-thick 347 H stainless steel. The plates are joined using a multi-pass weld technique that involved 40 passes to weld them together. The Neutron Residual Stress Mapping Facility instrument enables the team to study the weld’s residual stress by bombarding the roughly 90-pound sample with neutrons, which allows them to see how the material behaves at the atomic scale.