Crack Arrest Toughness of Thick Steel Plate Welds for Ship Building

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.

Design for avoid unstable fracture in shipbuilding and offshore plant structure

An¹,

Bae²,

Noh³

et al. 2015

A study on reduction of pre-crack deviation in CTOD specimen using reverse bending method

Jeong¹,

Park

Kim³

et al. 2015

This study investigates the appropriate range of reverse bending load for the CTOD test of thick weld by observing improvement of pre-crack shape and determination of the limit applicable load. In order to do it, the effect of the amount of the reverse bending load on the maximum deviation of the pre-crack length was investigated by the extensive tests, and the variation of plastic zone size in way of the crack tip under reverse bending load were evaluated by FEA. With the results obtained by the experiments and FEA, the proper range of reverse bending load was suggested. The effectiveness of the reverse bending method was verified by examining the pre-crack straightness after CTOD tests of thick weld specimens with various thickness and strength.

A Basic Study on Brittle Crack Propagation Path with Ultra Large Steel Plate Weld Joints

안¹,

한²,

박³

et al. 2017

As the recession in shipbuilding industry became longer, domestic shipbuilders focused on the need for high value added and high technology, and strived to build safer vessels. There are LNG carriers and container ships that require representative technologies. Both ship types are rapidly increasing ship size in the 2000s. 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. Studies on unstable fracture have mainly been conducted to evaluate the brittle crack stopping properties of the high strength steel welded joints through large scale fracture tests, and studies on the difficulty of stopping brittle cracks in welded joints. It is known that BCA (Brittle Crack Arrest) steel has recently been developed to prevent unstable fracture if cracks propagate toward the BCA steel even if brittle cracks occur. Therefore, it is considered that the ship can be dried more easily if a technology capable of inducing the brittle crack to the BCA steel is developed. In this study, we describe a technique for securing unsafe fracture safety by inducing cracks toward the BCA steel, which has excellent brittle crack stopping ability, regardless of the welding process when brittle cracks occur in the superstructure of super large container ships.