Soviet titanium electro-slag welding technology

Two-pass treatment. First Tom recounts realizing in 1980 that Gurevich's group had used electroslag for the Alpha sub hull. Then he describes returning to MIT and making "probably the first electroslag titanium weld outside of the Soviet Union or France." The Navy classified the result.

There are a number of welding processes that were used for welding titanium, one of which I didn't realize until 1980, in the Alpha sub. I was at a meeting down at David Taylor Ship Research Center in Annapolis, Maryland, and all of a sudden I realized Gurevich had been publishing in the early 70s on electroslag welding. Electroslag welding is a process where you have a wire feed, you have two vertical plates, you put a water-cooled copper dam on either side, and you put a little bit of flux in the center — you don't cover the whole length of the weld with flux, you put a handful of flux in there. You run the wire in, you melt the flux, and now it's the resistive heating of the flux that melts the wire and you just make a casting going up. [Tom passes around a sectioned titanium electroslag weld.] This is a two-inch thick titanium plate with a gap here. You can see where the water-cooled copper mold was, and the weld is this thing that's about two inches by two inches. Very efficient process.

The technical content Tom was after on the exchange. Paton Institute led the world in electroslag, and Tom's group made the first US electroslag weld on titanium ("just in the room next door") after Gurevich quit publishing. Closes with the inference that the Soviets used electroslag to weld their titanium hulls.

Electric Boat has a whole facility down at Quonset Point to get the extreme circularity you need for a good pressure hull in steel. They have an indoor building that cost $200 million down at Quonset Point so they can weld these things. They weren't using electroslag, they were using gas metal arc on the steel. But you could do that with electroslag, and the Soviets, the Paton Institute, were the leader in electroslag technology in the whole world. Gurevich had quit publishing on any of the titanium work, and so on my titanium project, when I came back, we took some of our one-inch plate and we made the first electroslag weld outside of one research project in France and the Soviet Union — at least the first one I know of. We made it just in the room next door. It was a terrible weld, no fusion, but we found that titanium is easier to electroslag weld than steel.

During a 1980 visit to the Ukraine with Julian Szekely, Tom learned that half of all Soviet steel was electroslag remelted. Julian's interpretation: Soviet BOP steel was so poor (fist-sized inclusions in ship plate) that ESR was necessary just to reach Western BOP quality. The political driver was Dr. Paton at the Paton Institute in Kiev — a WWII hero for electroslag welding of armor plate — who controlled ~25% of Soviet Ukrainian scientific funding and grew his institute to ~5000 people.

The only time I was ever in Russia, in the Ukraine, was back in 1980. I went with Julian Szekely, who was a professor here who had been a student in Hungary. He left Hungary in '56. I said, "Did you have a gun in your hand?" — he was a college student at the time. He said, "Well, yeah." I said, "How'd you get out of Hungary?" He says, "I just took the train to the Austrian border and walked across." But he did have a gun in his hand in the '56 revolt in Hungary. Anyway, Julian was a steel expert. When we were over there, the Soviets were very proud that half of the steel they produced was electroslag remelted. At the time we would only do this because it's an extra process — it costs you an extra $100 a ton to improve the quality. And Julian says, "Yeah, but that was because the stuff they made the first time around was such bad quality. They had to electroslag remelt it to get it up to the kind of quality we would get out of our BOP," which was probably true. Their stuff was just junk. They had to do electroslag remelting to get rid of all the big inclusions the size of your fist. Can you imagine a piece of steel for a ship plate that has an inclusion as thick as the plate? It just pops right through and you've got a hole in your plate. That's what the Soviets produced. So they had to do electroslag remelting to melt these inclusions and make a better ingot.