Effects of a double sided heating method and its controlling parameters: Development of a residual stress control method for butt-welded pipe joints (1st Report)

Abstract

This paper describes a new stress improvement method to reduce tensile residual stress on the inner and outer surfaces near butt-welded pipe joints. Its procedure is as follows. An annular region on both sides of the weld line is heated from the outside at the same time to generate a temperature differential between the weld line and region being heated. The region being heated and the welded joint are not actively cooled after completion of heating. That is to say, the proposed method involves the whole circumference on both sides of the weld line simply being left to cool after heating and includes no water cooling or movement of heating position as required by the low-temperature stress relaxation method. A tensile strain is generated on the inner surface near the welded joint to produce plastic deformation by tensile stress when the annular region is heated. The tensile stress after cooling is reduced by this plastic deformation. The two sided heating method can therefore be expected to exert a satisfactory and stable residual stress control effect.

The authors show the mechanism and effect of the proposed method by an FEM analysis. The effects of the controlling parameters of the method – such as e.g. the heating width, heating position, and heating conditions (intensity and time) – on the residual stress are studied. The proposed method is applied in practice to 4BSch40 (OD = 114.3 mm, t = 6.0 mm), 4BSch160 (OD = 114.3 mm, t = 13.5 mm), and 20B (OD = 508.0 mm, t = 8.0 mm) stainless steel pipe welded joints, and the changes in the residual stress are measured. The measured welding residual stress on the inner surface near the GTA (TIG) welded joints is more than + 200 MPa. The residual stress on the inner surface near the welded joints decreases, changing to compression in all joints after treatment by this method.