Study on ductile crack initiation limit from notch root of pipeline girth welded joints with strength mismatch

This study investigated ductile crack initiation limit of pipeline girth welded joints with different strength mismatches. The ductile crack initiation limit for the girth welded joints was evaluated by conducting three-point bending fracture toughness tests and wide plate tensile tests with a surface notch. In addition, effect of heat input on the ductile crack initiation limit of weld metal (WM) was evaluated on the assumption that a welding condition would be varied in the field in the actual pipeline construction. As the results, the equivalent plastic strain at the notch tip for the ductile crack initiation of the three-point bending tests was consistent with those of the wide plate tests, and the heat input hardly affected the ductile crack initiation limit within the range of this study. This meant that the ductile crack initiation limit of the pipeline girth welded joints with strength mis-match was able to be estimated using the equivalent plastic strain obtained from the three-point bending tests. Based on these results, we proposed a procedure to determine the rational fracture toughness requirements which took into account the difference in the plastic constraint between standard fracture toughness test and pipeline girth welded joints. This procedure was also possible to determine the required strength matching level for a strain-based design for girth welded joint containing surface notch in the centre of the WM in terms of preventing the ductile crack initiation.