Evaluation of hydrogen trapping in high strength steels by thermal desorption spectroscopy

High strength steels are materials of considerable interest and are increasingly used but appear to be more prone to hydrogen embrittlement (HE). In this work, four high strength steels and a pure iron, as a reference material, were studied by thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS) in order to evaluate hydrogen trapping in these materials and to correlate it to the observed response of these materials to the previously evaluated effect of hydrogen on their mechanical properties. It was found that the materials which display a rather fast and significant ductility loss during hydrogen charged tensile testing contained a higher amount of diffusible hydrogen after charging. The activation energies for the peaks present in the TDS spectra were calculated for all materials and indicated that the activation energies for all low temperature peaks are pretty similar.