Investigation of Ductile Fracture Arrest of High Strength Steels for Gas Pipeline Application

The ductile fracture arrest may present supplementary requirement for selection of base material for most demanding steel welded structures. The most representative one with such requirement are gas pipelines. Therefore to ensure that the pipeline materials has adequate toughness to arrest a ductile fracture, the pipe material must be designed and tested in accordance with the specific procedures, such as one specified in ASME B31.8, e.g. supplementary requirements SR5 of API 5L. Actually, the average of the Charpy energy values must meet or exceed the energy value calculated using one of the available equations that have been developed in various pipeline research programs. The paper presents such investigation for selected high strength steels grades for gas pipeline application, while considering the Charpy energy of base metal at various design or testing temperatures.