• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.74-80
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• 2009

The membrane of the LNG carriers consists of thin strips of INVAR(Fe-36%Ni) steel plates, and the junction between INVAR strips is fabricated by welding. Thousands of the raised edge joints, regularly spaced, are located around all the side of the tank corner near the transverse bulkhead, and TIG welding is manually made on the top of the raised edges. Since the thickness of all the laminated edge plies is extremely thin and the weld position is under a bad accessibility, highly skilled workers are required to perform welding relatively for a long welding time. An alternative scheme for the corner membrane fabrication is proposed in the study to improve the installation workability and thus productivity. The scheme replaces the welded edges with the preformed corrugation ones. A panel strip with regularly-spaced corrugations is installed at the corner instead of the individual flat strip of which edge is vertically raised to be welded with the adjacent strip. In the study, a series of the evaluation on the corrugated edge members was performed to assess the applicability to the real LNG carrier fabrication. Opening displacement at the raised edge was experimentally examined. Elastic stiffness regressed from the displacement was nearly same in both edge types. Edge displacement and local stresses were calculated under hydrostatic pressure and temperature change due to liquefied cargo. Fatigue test was performed on both corrugated and welded edge specimens consisting of two or five plies of invar strips. Fatigue strength of the corrugated specimens was not less than that of the welded specimens.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2016

With the recent increase in size of ships and offshore structures, there are more demand for thicker plates. As the thickness increases, it is known that fatigue life of the structures decrease. To improve the fatigue life, post weld treatments techniques, such as toe grinding, TIG dressing and hammer peening, are typically employed. However, these techniques require additional construction time and production cost. Therefore, it is of crucial interest steels with longer fatigue crack growth life compared to conventional steels. This study investigates fatigue crack growth rate (FCGR) behaviours of conventional EH36 steel and Ferrite-Bainite dual phase EH36 steel (F-B steel). F-B steel is known to have improved fatigue performance associated with the existence of two different phases. Ferrite-Bainite dual phase microstructures are obtained by special thermo mechanical control process (TMCP). FCGR behaviours are investigated by a series of constant stress-controlled FCGR tests. Considering all test conditions (ambient, low temperature, high stress ratio), it is shown that FCGR of F-B steel is slower than that of conventional EH36 steel. From the tensile tests and impact tests, F-B steel exhibits higher values of strength and impact energy leading to slower FCGR.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.120-126
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• 2015

Recently, the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels for rapid industrial development and population significantly caused an environment pollution and global warming such as climate change. So research and development of sustainable and eco-friendly energy have been performed. Especially the interest in nuclear fusion fuel was significantly increased from the developed countries. The system of fusion energy production was tritium separation, storage and delivery, and purification. Republic of Korea is in charge of Storage and Delivery System (SDS) in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Welding part of the SDS bottles for storing the tritium is known to be susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement. In this study, conducted a study for the relaxation of the stability and hydrogen embrittlement of the weld area. The hydrogen heat treatment was processed through the Pressure-Composition-Temperature (PCT) device according to the time variation. Also mechanical properties such as impact test and hardness test according to using the alkaline cleaning liquid for hydrogen embrittlement relief and the fracture was observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) after the mechanical properties evaluation.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1115-1120
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• 2003

The recent tendency in the automobile industries is toward light weighting vehicle body to improve the problems by environmental pollution as well as improving fuel cost. The effective way to reduce the weight of vehicle body seems to be application of new materials for body structure and such trend is remarkable. Among the various materials for vehicle body, stainless steel sheet (for example, 301L and 304L), TRIP steel and cold rolled steel sheets are under the interests. However, in order to guarantee reliability of new material and to establish the long life design criteria of body structure, it is important and require condition to assess spot weldability of them and fatigue strength of spot welded lap joints which were fabricated under optimized spot welding condition. And, recently, a new issue in the design of the spot welded structure is to predict economically fatigue design criterion without additional fatigue tests. In general, for fatigue design of the spot-welded thin sheet structure, additional fatigue tests according to the welding condition, material, joint type, and fatigue loading condition are generally required. This indicates that much cost and time for it should be consumed. Therefore, in this paper, the maximum stresses at nugget edge of spot weld were calculated through nonlinear finite element analysis first. And next, obtained the ${\Delta}P-N_{f}$ relation through the actual fatigue tests on spot welded lap joints of similar and dissimilar high strength steel sheets. And then, the ${\Delta}P-N_{f}$ relation was rearranged in the ${\Delta}{\sigma}-N_{f}$ relation. From this ${\Delta}{\sigma}-N_{f}$ relation, developed the fatigue design technology for spot welded lap joints of them welded using the optimized welding conditions.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.124-129
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• 2014

The piping system accounts for a large portion of the machinery structure of a plant, and is considered as a very important mechanical structure for plant safety. Accordingly, it is used in most energy plants in the nuclear, gas, and heavy chemical industries. In particular, the piping system for a nuclear plant is generally complicated and uses the reactor and its cooling system. The piping equipment is exposed to diverse loads such as weight, temperature, pressure, and seismic load from pipes and fluids, and is used to transfer steam, oil, and gas. In ultrasound infrared thermography, which is an active thermography technology, a 15-100 kHz ultrasound wave is applied to the subject, and the resulting heat from the defective parts is measured using a thermography camera. Because this technique can inspect a large area simultaneously and detect defects such as cracks and delamination in real time, it is used to detect defects in the new and renewable energy, car, and aerospace industries, and recently, in piping defect detection. In this study, ultrasound infrared thermography is used to detect information for the diagnosis of nuclear equipment and structures. Test specimens are prepared with piping materials for nuclear plants, and the optimally designed ultrasound horn and ultrasound vibration system is used to determine damages on nuclear plant piping and detect defects. Additionally, the detected images are used to improve the reliability of the surface and internal defect detection for nuclear piping materials, and their field applicability and reliability is verified.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.17-25
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• 1998

Aluminum alloys have low density, relatively high strength and yield strength, good plasticity, good machinability, and high corrosion and acid resistance. Therefore, they are suitable for large containers for the food, chemical and other industries. Large containers are often bodies of revolution consisting of shell courses, stiffening rings, heads and other elements joined by annular welds. Larger containers have longer welds and require greater leak-tightness and higher weld mechanical properties. The LNG tank consists of aluminum plates with various sizes, so its construction should by divided by several sections. Moreover, each section has its own sub-section consisted of several aluminum plates. To guarantee the quality of huge LNG tank, therefore, the precise control of plate dimension should by urgently needed in conjunction with the appropriate selection of process parameters such as cutting speed, depth of cut, rotational speed and so on. In this paper, a manufacturing system was developed to implement automatic circular tracking in height direction and automatic circular interpolation in depth of cut direction. Also, the neural network based on the backpropagation algorithm was used to predict the cutting quality and motor load related with the life time of the developed system. It was revealed that the manufacturing system and the neural network could be effectively applied to the bevelling process and to predict the quality of machined area and the motor load.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.4-4
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• 2009

Polycarbonate (PC) and Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) was welded through a combination of a diode laser and CNC. Laser beam passed the transparent PC and was absorbed in an opaque ABS. Polymers were melted and welded by absorbed and conducted heat. Experiments were carried out by varying working distance from 44mm to 50mm for the focus spot diameter control, laser input power from 10W to 25W, and scanning speed from 100 to 400mm/min. The weld bead size and the specimen cross-section were analyzed, and tensile results were presented through the joint force measurement. With focus distance at 48mm, laser power with 20W, and welding speed at 300mm/min, experimental results showed the best welding quality which bead size was 3.75mm and the shear strength was $22.8N/mm^2$. Considering tensile strength of ABS is $43N/mm^2$, shear strength was sufficient to hold two materials. A single process was possible in CNC machining processes, surface processing, hole machining and welding. As a result, the process cycle time was reduced to 25%. Compared to a typical process, specimens were fabricated in a single process, with high precision. By combining two operations processes developed process gained 50% more efficiency.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.35-40
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• 2015

Recently, there have been the increase of ship size and the development of oil and gas in arctic region. These trends have led to the requirements such as high strength, good toughness at low temperature and good weldability for prevent of brittle fracture at service temperature. There has been the key issue of crack arrestability in large size structure such as container ship. In this report for the first time, crack arrest toughness of thick steel plate welds was evaluated by large scale ESSO test for estimate of brittle crack arrestability in thick steel plate. For large structures using thick steel plates, fracture toughness of welded joint is an important factor to obtain structural integrity. In general, there are two kinds of design concepts based on fracture toughness: crack initiation and crack arrest. So far, when steel structures such as buildings, bridges and ships were manufactured using thick steel plates (max. 80~100mm in thickness), they had to be designed in order to avoid crack initiation, especially in welded joint. However, crack arrest design has been considered as a second line of defense and applied to limited industries like pipelines and nuclear power plants. Although welded joint is the weakest part to brittle fracture, there are few results to investigate crack arrest toughness of welded joint. In this study, brittle crack arrest designs were developed for hatch side coaming of large container ships using arrest weld, hole, and insert technology.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Heat Treatment
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.34-44
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• 1996

Austenite stainless steel was produced by arc welding with current 650A, voltage 50V and welding speed 10cm/min. It was post-welded and then heat treated at $1,050^{\circ}C$ for 120min. And then it was immersed in water or in air. The microstructural changes, ferrite contents, mechanical properties, and stress corrosion cracking(SCC) were investigated. The SCC was studied in 42wt% boiling $MgCl_2$($140^{\circ}C$) under the constant stress using SCC elongation curve. The results showed that; 1. The as-welded spedimen seemed to increase ${\delta}$-ferrite content largely, and revealed continuous network of lathy and vermicular type. The post-welded heat treatment changed the morphologies of ferrite from continuous type to island type. 2. The as-welded, air and water quenched specimens had the ${\delta}$-ferrite content 9.7%, 3.2% and 2.1% respectively. We also showed that ${\delta}$-ferrite was Cr-rich and Ni-poor by EPMA. 3. The time of failure on the SCC was measured and it was used for corrosion elongation curve. The condition of SCC was investigated under $35kgf/mm^2$ load and the results were as follows; 4. The intergranullar cracking by stress corrosion was most distinct in weld metal while the transgranular cracking occurred in the air cooled specimen.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.1423-1432
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• 2016

The integrity of a reactor pressure vessel (RPV) related to pressurized thermal shocks (PTSs) has been extensively studied. This paper introduces an integrity assessment of an RPV subjected to a PTS transient based on the French codes. In the USA, the "screening criterion" for maximum allowable embrittlement of RPV material is developed based on the probabilistic fracture mechanics. However, in the French RCC-M and RSE-M codes, which are developed based on the deterministic fracture mechanics, there is no "screening criterion". In this paper, the methodology in the RCC-M and RSE-M codes, which are used for PTS analysis, are firstly discussed. The bases of the French codes are compared with ASME and FAVOR codes. A case study is also presented. The results show that the method in the RCC-M code that accounts for the influence of cladding on the stress intensity factor (SIF) may be nonconservative. The SIF almost doubles if the weld residual stress is considered. The approaches included in the codes differ in many aspects, which may result in significant differences in the assessment results. Therefore, homogenization of the codes in the long time operation of nuclear power plants is needed.