Impact of precipitates on the hydrogen embrittlement behavior of a V-alloyed medium-manganese austenitic stainless steel

This paper discusses the avoidance of hydrogen embrittlement (HE) in a medium manganese stainless steel X20CrNiMnVN18-5-10. We adopted a HE-mitigation strategy that relies on improving its intrinsic resistance to hydrogen by adjusting an ultrafine microstructure (∼1.3 µm) containing a significant amount of nano-sized V- and Cr-based precipitates in the size range of 20 - ≥200 nm. The precipitation state was characterized using a high-resolution...