Field nondestructive examination of ERW pipe seams

Technical Report · Mon Jun 17 04:00:00 EDT 1991

OSTI ID:6002250

Electric resistance welded (ERW) pipe has been used in the natural gas transmission industry for many years. The DOT has requested that natural gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipeline operators determine whether or not their pipelines that meet this description require hydrostatic proof testing. The initial concern from the DOT was for seam weld selective corrosion, although reference has since been made to growth of manufacturing discontinuities in the ERW seam. There exist a need for a method that a pipeline operator could use to demonstrate the integrity of pipelines that were made from this older ERW pipe other than hydrostatic testing, which is expensive and potentially harmful to pipeline integrity. The use of a nondestructive-examination (NDE) technique would enable an operator to sample the integrity of a suspect pipeline during other routine in- service maintenance operations without the need for hydrostatic testing. Recently, several ultrasonic techniques have been introduced to study these types of discontinuities in resistance spot welds and inertia friction welds. These new techniques are based on ultrasonic spectroscopy, that is, the frequency dependence of the various ultrasonic interfacial parameters. These parameters include reflection and transmission coefficients and the frequency dependence of ultrasonic volumetric parameters (e.g., velocity and attenuation). This report describes the adaptation of these techniques to incomplete fusion discontinuities in the seam of ERW pipe.

• Research Organization: Edison Welding Inst., Columbus, OH (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: AGA; American Gas Association, Inc., Arlington, VA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 6002250
• Report Number(s): EWI-92008155; PR--185-926; CNN: PR-185-926; Project J7160
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

03 NATURAL GAS
032000* -- Natural Gas-- Transport
Handling
& Storage
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
360103 -- Metals & Alloys-- Mechanical Properties
CHEMICAL REACTIONS
CORROSION
CRACK PROPAGATION
DOCUMENT TYPES
ENERGY SOURCES
FLUIDS
FOSSIL FUELS
FUEL GAS
FUELS
GAS FUELS
GASES
JOINTS
MATERIALS TESTING
NATURAL GAS
NONDESTRUCTIVE TESTING
PIPELINES
PROGRESS REPORT
SOUND WAVES
TESTING
ULTRASONIC WAVES
WELDED JOINTS