Quincy LNG tanker aluminum tank skirts

Tom's tenure as a Bethlehem Steel engineer developing weldable steel for the 150-foot-diameter cylindrical skirt supporting the aluminum LNG sphere. Coast Guard required Charpy testing at weld centerline, toe, and 1/3/5 mm into HAZ at 20 ft-lb / −20°F. Sparrows Point steel-making struggled to meet the spec on base plate; shipyard would hunt down high-toughness plates (30 ft-lb outliers) to cherry-pick for runoff tab testing — gaming the Coast Guard reporting.

To give you another example of getting different properties: when I was an engineer at Bethlehem Steel — this is for you Coast Guard folks — they were building LNG tankers right down here in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was an old shipyard that Bethlehem Steel had built in World War One I think. They were building the great big spherical LNG tankers, and they had to have a steel skirt. It was basically just a cylinder, about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and you put the sphere on top of this skirt. So you have this big aluminum sphere and then you have a skirt that is the pedestal that the sphere sits on.

Tom's project welding the steel skirts that supported the aluminum LNG tanks. Coast Guard 20 foot-pound specification at four positions per weld drove the test-plate substitution scheme — the shipyard cut all test plates from the rare 30 foot-pound outlier plate from Sparrows Point.

So when I was working on the skirts to hold up these big aluminum tanks for the LNG tankers down at Quincy — they were building them at Quincy — that's what I had to do. I had to measure each one of those locations along the weld. I had to weld a plate a foot long just to get all the specimens out of it, because you had big tensile specimens and everything else.