Extreme value distributions of inclusions in six steels

摘要

There is a prevailing assumption that the largest inclusions in steel volumes follows mode I of the Generalized Extreme Values (GEV) distribution. In this work, the GEV distributions of non-metallic inclusions in six different high performance steels, of different grades and processing routes, were investigated by means of fractography of inclusions causing failure in ultrasonic fatigue testing to one billion cycles and all three modes of the GEV were found for the different steel grades. Values of the shape parameter ξ of the GEV distribution as high as 0.51 (standard deviation 0.11) were found in one steel grade. Thus, the present results show that the assumption of GEV-I (Gumbel, LEVD) distribution has to be substantiated before being used to estimate the size of the largest inclusions.