Guidelines for Assessing Corrosion Associated With Welds Available to Purchase

Factors that create important property and stress-field differences between welds and base metal have been reviewed as have a variety of seam and girth weld field failures and laboratory tests to define considerations that must be address in adapting corrosion assessment criteria for the pipe body to weld seams. Thereafter, guidelines for the use of such criteria in applications to weld seams were developed in terms of metrics that include mechanical and fracture properties, the pipeline’s loadings and service conditions, and the nature of the corrosion. A flowchart was developed to implement these metrics. The guidelines were validated by comparison of their predicted outcome against results for full-scale tests, laboratory tests, and in-service failures involving corrosion on weld seams, for both girth welds and longitudinal seams. For some applications, the one-size-fits-all approach adopted in formulating these guidelines can lead to conservative results.