Abstract
While excellent joint quality has been obtained using dry chamber underwater welding methods, the size limitations imposed by this process restrict its use for underwater construction work. The wet underwater shielded metal-arc welding eliminates this restriction but suffers from poor weld properties by the 1-pass bead-on-plate welding due to the excessive diffusible hydrogen. On the other hand, in the wet underwater welding, it is well known that the quantity of diffusible hydrogen in multi-pass welded parts reduce to less than that in 1-pass welded parts. Therefore, in this paper, welding experiments are made the 3-pass bead-on-plate welds by using TMCP and normalized steel plates and E4301 and cellulose coated electrode. After that, The amounts of the hydrogen absorbed into the 3-pass welded area were measured according to the JIS Z 3118 specification. The microstructural changes as well as the microhardness distribution after the underwater 3-pass welding were also investigated using Vickers microhardness tester and S.E.M and O.M. The results indicated that the quantity of diffusible hydrogen in 3-pass welded areas was reduced little less than a half of one of that in 1-pass welded areas at the specific welding condition. As a result, the cold cracking of 3-pass welded areas decreased by reduced effect of diffusible hydrogen. In the underwater 3-pass welding, the micrography of cold cracking fracture surface showed mainly the cleavage of hydrogen embrittlement.
