A study on the effect of weld groove designs on residual stresses in SS 304LN thick multipass pipe welds

Present research describes the effect of weld groove designs on residual stresses of thick SS 304LN pipe welds which are commonly utilized for applications such as boiling water reactor system, oil and steam piping. The faying surfaces of the pipe joints were machined to generate conventional and narrow groove geometries for welding. Circumferential multipass pipe welding was carried out without applying preheat and post weld heat treatment. Blind hole drilling technique was employed for measuring hoop and axial residual stresses in narrow and conventional grooved SS 304LN pipe welds considering plasticity and stress concentration effects of hole drilling process. The result exhibited 20 to 30 percent reduction in residual stresses in narrow grooved pipe welds. A finite element model was developed for estimating the pass by pass peak temperature distributions in the pipe welds. Sequentially coupled thermomechanical elastic-plastic analysis of both conventional and narrow groove pipe welds indicated close agreement between the predicted and experimentally determined hoop and axial residual stresses.