The Role of Weld Processing on the Integrity Assessment of Bimetallic Girth Welds

Current design standards and codes do not provide specific guidance how to perform engineering criticality assessment with bi-metallic girth weld in lined or clad pipe. Recently, Bonora et al. (Proc. ASME 2013 32^nd OMAE conf.) proposed the equivalent material method (EMM) which allows one to still use current design assessment routes. The method consists in considering instead of three materials in the weld joint, a single “equivalent” material with a flow curve defined as the interpolated lower bound of the three weld joint material flow curves. In this work, the applicability of the EMM was verified considering the effect associated to weld residual stresses. To this purpose, two flaw geometry configurations have been investigated. Particular relevance was given to the multi-pass weld process simulation. Numerical results indicate that the EMM always provides reasonable results in terms of applied J with respect to those obtained considering the effective multimaterials configuration in the weld joint.