Bethlehem Steel offshore platform lamellar tearing (mid-1970s)

Tom's first-hand context for the lamellar tearing era. Big oil-platform plates 3–4 inches thick, 400 ppm sulfur in the steel, dirty 1911-era blast furnaces. Tom's office mate at Bethlehem worked on it.

Porosity — we get gases in. Porosity is not usually a huge problem unless it gets really gross, like 10% by volume, and then it weakens the steel. Hydrogen cracking — we're going to spend a lot of time on. Lamellar tearing was a problem back when we had steels that had 400 parts per million sulfur and big oxide inclusions. This was the steel-making technology of the 1960s and before. Big problem. When I worked at Bethlehem Steel in the mid-70s, the oil companies were building a lot of big offshore oil platforms. Big heavy steel plates 3 and 4 inches thick. They were getting lamellar tearing problems because the steel wasn't very clean. The Japanese taught us you can make steel inexpensively if you have modern facilities — not if you have 1911 blast furnaces, like Bethlehem Steel had. So the United States fell behind.