Catastrophic Impact Loading Resilience of Welded Joints of High Strength Steel of Refineries’ Piping Systems

Refineries piping installation systems are designed, fabricated, and operated to assure very high levels of quality and structural integrity, to provide very high resilience to catastrophic events like earthquakes, explosions, or fires, which could induce catastrophic damage of piping systems due to collapse of nearby structures as towers, bridges, poles, walkways, vessels, etc. To evaluate the catastrophic impact loading resilience to failure of MMA (Manual Metal Arc Welding), GMA (Gas Metal Arc Welding), SSA (Self-shielded Arc Welding), and LASER+GMA of modern API 5L X80 pipes butt welded joints used for piping installation systems of refineries, the new, original technique of the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of impact loading resilience of butt welded joints of pipes was developed. The high-quality butt welded joints were impact loaded by the freely dropping 3000 kg mass hammer of the die forging hammer apparatus. The impact loading energy needed to exceed the yield strength of the extreme zone of welded joints and to induce catastrophic fracture of butt welded joints of API 5L X80 pipes was calculated using FEM (Finite Element Method) modeling of the impact loading process of tested butt welded joints of pipes. Results of the FEM modeling of impact loading technique of butt welded joints of piping systems indicate that it is a useful tool to provide valuable data for experimental impact loading tests of welded joints of pipes, decreasing the time and cost of the experiments. The developed impact loading technique of butt welded joints of pipes to simulate the catastrophic events in refinery piping systems and evaluate the resilience of the butt welded joints of pipes to catastrophic failure proved to be very efficient and accurate. Experiments of impact loading indicated that all specimens of butt welded joints API 5L X80 steel pipes are resilient to failure (cracks) in the extreme stressed/strained areas, above yield and tensile strength of the weld metals, no cracks or tears appeared in the extreme stressed/strained areas of the edges of the pipes, proving the very high quality of API 5L X80 steel pipes.