Environmental regulations of the IMO (International Maritime Organization) are becoming more and more conservative. In order to respond to IMO, the demand for replacing the fuel of ships with eco-friendly fuels instead of conventional heavy oil is increasing in the shipbuilding and offshore industries. Among eco-friendly fuels, LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) is currently the most popular fuel. LNG is characteristically liquefied at -163 degrees, and at this time, its volume is reduced to 1/600, so it is transported in a cryogenic liquefied state for transport efficiency. A tank for storing this should have sufficient mechanical/thermal performance at cryogenic temperatures, and among them, high manganese steel is known as a material with high price competitiveness and satisfying these performance. However, high manganese steel has a limitation in that the mechanical performance of the filler metal is lower than that of the base metal called ‘under matching’. In this study, to overcome this limitation, a basic study was conducted to apply the fiber laser welding method without filler metal to high manganese steel. To obtain efficient welding conditions, in this study, bead-on-plate welding was performed by changing the fiber laser welding speed and output using helium shielding gas, and the effect of each factor on the penetration shape was analyzed through cross-sectional observation.

The use of the nickel free, high nitrogen stainless steel powder and nitriding during sintering of iron based materials have been shown as an alternative way to the conventional PM stainless steels containing nickel. Nitrogen as an alloying element for iron improves in an effective way the properties of sintered alloyed steels. The powder metallurgy route is a suitable way to introduce nitrogen into these alloys and, in particular, to produce high nitrogen (close to the solubility limit) stainless steels. The paper presents and discusses the nitriding behavior of nickel-free stainless steels produced by powder metallurgy method. Alloyed melt was atomized by nitrogen and in this way nitrogen was introduced into the powder. Further nitriding occurred during sintering in a nitrogen atmosphere. For comparison, compacts having the same composition as an alloyed powder were produced from elemental powders mixture. Sintering-nitriding behaviour of investigated materials has been controlled by dilatometry, chemical and X-Ray phase analysis and metallography. Mechanical properties of sintered compacts were also measured.