Hydrogen cracking in welded steel

Tom's own work at Bethlehem Steel using a three-inch plate with a window cutout to fully restrain a test weld with strain gauges. Pedagogical illustration of how restraint is simulated in the lab.

One of the things I have to get rid of is some of the stress. But how do I even simulate it? If you go back to Stout and Doty's book, which is where this thing came from, there's lots of ways to try to simulate it. When I worked at Bethlehem Steel and one of the other engineers had a hydrogen cracking project, we had some three-inch-thick plate, and we cut a little window in it, and we put two-inch plates up against that. We would put the steel we wanted to test as a vertical piece, and we'd weld it into this three-inch plate, so it's completely restrained. They had strain gauges on it to try to quantify everything.