HY-80 and HY-100 steel development

Cost of qualifying new pressure vessel steels — $50M in 1960s money for HY80/HY100 development; today hundreds of millions. Referenced as benchmark for DoE's stalled 9% nickel / Ni-1Mo qualification effort.

When I said it cost fifty million dollars in 1960s money to develop HY80 and HY100, they were doing full trials. But you can have a whole 200-ton heat made by US Steel for probably half a million dollars back then. Today, if you want to develop a new steel, you're probably in several hundreds of millions of dollars in different qualification tests.

Passed around as $2–3/lb benchmark to contrast with $12,000/lb X-33 composite. Manufactured at Electric Boat, Groton.

[Tom hands a piece of HY-80 around.] This is a piece of HY-80, made by our friends down there in Groton. You'll feel the weight and density. As-fabricated, that's probably two or three bucks a pound for the cost of what you're going to float or sink, as the case may be. [Tom hands a piece of X-33 composite around.] That is a piece of the X-33 space plane that cost $12,000 a pound for that composite. So you've got $2 a pound and you've got $12,000 a pound. But it's light, isn't it? It's not as strong and it's more brittle. It wouldn't do well in an explosion. But you can get things into space and still have some payload left over. You can afford it at $12,000 a pound. You could make an Indianapolis racer out of that material, but you can't afford to make a Ford Taurus out of it and sell it to anybody.

If I were welding steel, this happens to be an example of welding two plates of different thickness, and they show how you would taper one down in aluminum. Because steel has more toughness, which means it can tolerate sharp corners a lot more than aluminum. It has lots of ductility. Aluminum doesn't have as much ductility. The director of research at U.S. Steel — admittedly not the most unbiased person when it comes to aluminum — this is John Groves who helped develop HY-80s back in the 50s and 60s, when I was a young engineer I heard him say he called aluminum "the near-metal." Steel was the metal and aluminum was nearly a metal. Might have a little ductility but it wasn't anything close to steel, according to John. There's some truth to that, but it's also a little bit unfair.

HY-100 noted as same composition as HY-80, different heat treatment.

If you look at some of these other things — they once wanted to use an alloy which is very similar, actually it's the predator [predecessor] alloy, to what is now HSLA-80. There's HY-80 that was developed in the 1940s and 50s by U.S. Steel, used in the Nautilus submarine, and used until recently — recently being twenty years — on other subs. They built a couple of HY-100, which is actually the same composition, just a different heat treatment, to give you HY-100. The Navy in the 1960s developed HY-130, and we've never really used it for a full-size ship. We can talk about why.

HY steels framed as the achievement of the 1950s–60s Navy-funded weldability research. Tom holds up his own 30-year-old HY80 weld at §7.p1 to show the heat-affected zone. At §10.p2 he discusses a 100 ksi quenched-and-tempered plate (HY100-class chemistry but lower) that failed Charpy.

Why do people think they can solve all welding problems with metallurgy? Because historically, education of welders in this country started big-time at Lehigh University in the 1940s. Bob Stout was dean of the graduate school — Stout and Doty wrote Weldability of Steels in the 1940s. That was a big place doing welding research. Some of those guys went out of Lehigh to US Steel and they developed all the HY steels in the 50s and 60s with Navy money — those high-strength submarine steels — and they had to be weldable because they were going to make submarines out of it. But Lehigh didn't keep their faculty current in that area. They had Al Pense, who's still around, but he rose to become provost of the university. Once you get to the administrative levels, you stop minding the store at the lower levels.