Identification of Inhomogeneous Temperature on Stainless Steel using Statistical Analysis
Abstract Corrosion in stainless steel, abbreviated as SS, is still an exciting topic to study. Even though SS is a corrosion resistance material, this property will be degraded when exposed to high temperatures for a long time because of σ phase, such as a Fe-Cr compound, formation. The presence of this phase can be observed using a special chemical etchant solution that will give five specific colours to this phase: light brown, dark brown, bluish brown, light blue, and dark blue. In this study, the specimen sample is from ASTM A297. Furthermore, the metallography process is carried out to obtain microstructure images that describe the σ phase. Here, two grains were taken as objects to discretize with one of them was around the specimen sample center and the other was close to the boundary with the environment. The discretization resulted in a 2 x 5 frequency table, called contingency table, that is analysed by the independence χ2-test. The contingency table is also represented geometrically in cartesian. The study shows that two grains were not independent. The grain which was around the specimen sample center contained many σ phases dominated by light blue colour (43%). In other words, the prolonged heating did not give homogeneous corrosion level.