WM_Su2015_11

Welding Metallurgy Summer 2015 Session · 9 sections 14 cases · Watch on YouTube ↗ all files
Layer 3 — readable edition

§1. Cardiac guide wires and cow magnets [00:04]

§1.p1

We're talking about stainless steels, and this is a guide wire. Has anybody ever had heart surgery? They come in through a big artery in your leg and snake these little stainless steel wires, teflon-coated, up through the vein. This is an old one, about twenty-five years old. The thing is very flexible at the tip. The surgeon takes it through the arteries, gets it where they need to go, and then they use it as sort of a transport rope to send other things up there — a balloon, a stent, whatever they want to put in your heart.

§1.p2

They were having problems with the weld breaking. It only had to lift about two and a half pounds, and it wouldn't even do that. This is nominally austenitic stainless steel 304, which we all think of as fairly non-magnetic. It's a very fine wire coiled to make it flexible — like a little coil spring with another wire down the center.

§1.p3

I actually got two new ones because there was a lawsuit. Some guy supposedly got an errant operation and they left about thirty inches of it inside him. They sue anyway. These cost $1,500 apiece.

§1.p4

[Tom produces a magnet.] It's a stainless steel magnet. None of you grew up on a farm, I take it. This is a cow magnet. You make the dairy cattle swallow this. It turns out, when they're out grazing, they sometimes pick up wire from the fence. If that gets into their udders, it destroys them, and they're not much good as a milk cow at that point. So the stainless steel magnet grabs onto the carbon steel that they might eat and holds it in the stomach. The stainless steel doesn't corrode in stomach acid, but the carbon steel sticks to the magnet and stays put.

§1.p5

That's why 7-Up was named 7-Up, by the way. It had lithium in it — you could buy it as a soft drink in the 1930s. Lithium is an antidepressant. And Coca-Cola — Coke was invented by a druggist in Georgia at a pharmacy soda fountain. The Coca-Cola formula is one of the most tightly kept secrets in the world, in a vault in Atlanta.


§2. Stress relief in welding [04:45]

§2.p1

I want to mention some things about stress relief. This applies to all welds, not just stainless. You don't want to stress relieve stainless steel because you'll be right in the sensitization range — you can destroy the corrosion resistance with a thermal stress relief. But stress relief in welding is needed. If I have a joint with no included angle — an electron beam weld, say — there's almost no distortion; the metal shrinks a little because it contracts on solidification. But as I open up the angle, I get a V-shaped weld, and the bigger the V, the more contraction. Steel is about three and a half percent contraction on solidification; aluminum is six percent. Aluminum has much bigger distortion problems than steel.

§2.p2

You have to balance welds. If you weld a groove weld all from one side, then go fill up the other side, it never comes all the way back. You're better off welding partway on one side, flipping, welding partway on the other, and alternating. One of my students, John Galati, his first job at Electric Boat was developing ways to weld the torpedo tubes — about forty feet long. They had to weld several tubes together, and he balanced the welds on either side as he was going around the circle. You might do a weld at three o'clock, change, go to nine o'clock, balance the welds around the circumference to get rid of the distortion.

§2.p3

You have a choice in welding between distortion and residual stresses: you can have residual stresses and no distortion, or a lot of distortion and no residual stresses. It's more complex than that. Thicker materials are so rigid that once you start building up thickness — say you're welding something four inches thick — once you put a two-inch weld in there, it's not going to bend anymore. It's a solid rigid structure. Whereas thin material — sheet metal, eighth-inch material — you weld one pass and it distorts. Thin material tends to distort, thick material tends to have residual stresses. The worst thickness of all, the most difficult to deal with, is about three-eighths of an inch or one centimeter. You surface ship guys — that's the thickness you tend to be dealing with.

§2.p4

You get a fair amount of distortion and you can also get residual stresses. And now people are making eighth-inch steel ships. Here are actual pictures of welds. This is 5083 aluminum with a fairly deep, parallel-sided penetrating weld — no distortion. When you get parallel-sided welds, you can avoid distortion. As you get thicker and the weld opens up, you get more and more distortion.


§3. Post-weld heat treatment and mechanical stress relief [08:57]

§3.p1

When you have residual stresses, you lose fatigue strength, fracture toughness — lots of things. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, if you're building pressure vessels, requires you stress relieve anything above an inch and a half thick. The hull of a sub is more than an inch and a half thick. How do we usually stress relieve welds?

§3.p2

Student: Post-weld heat treatment.

§3.p3

Post-weld heat treatment, for carbon steels and alloy steels. We pre-heat steels to drive the hydrogen off. We post-heat them to soften the material if it's a highly alloyed steel. But once you get to inch and a quarter, inch and a half, you're going to have yield-level residual stresses in there. The material has plastically deformed as you continue to put weld bead in. Go four inches thick, I guarantee you have residual stresses equal to the yield strength of the material. In a complex three-dimensional structure you can have triaxial stresses. You can have HY-100 [steel] with stresses of 120, 130 ksi in a complex shape.

§3.p4

So typically for things inch-and-a-half thick, ASME boiler pressure code says you must stress relieve to meet the code. Submarines especially. Note: that's post-weld heat treatment in the eleven-, twelve-hundred-degree range, not the three- to four-hundred-degree preheat to keep hydrogen out. You can preheat and you can low-temperature post-weld heat treat with little blankets right around the weld to diffuse the hydrogen out. You don't stress relieve the whole vessel.

§3.p5

For thermal stress relief, this is a pressure vessel shop. Here's a vessel, and they're putting blankets all the way around. After they weld the whole thing, they heat it up to 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, typically per hour of thickness. They build a furnace around it. The blankets are like welding power supplies. Surface ships, you tend to use electrical heaters. I don't know what they're doing in the service shipyards right now. But you build it, you put insulation, you build your furnace around the vessel.

§3.p6

In some places they have huge vessels — Babcock & Wilcox or somewhere — with a heat treating furnace the size of a two-story house, and they put the whole vessel right inside that furnace. This other one is portable. A company comes in and builds a box about the size of a railroad car, on railroad tracks. The furnace slides over the vessel. You heat it up to 1400 degrees, might take a day or two to heat the whole thing, and hold it there for a couple of hours.

§3.p7

How do you stress relieve a sub? You do it on the first deep dive. It's mechanical stress relief. It's full of residual stresses until you go down deep, and the whole thing gets squeezed. The areas that are in high tensile stress, when you put them in big compression, they yield. You have to have equilibrium of forces — for all you mechanical engineers, you have to have equilibrium of forces. If you have tensile residual stresses here, you have to balance them with an equal amount of compressive forces. So if you compress at a fairly high stress level, the compressed areas yield. As they yield, when they come back up, there's less residual stress. You can mechanically relieve residual stresses.

§3.p8

I'll talk about this more when we get to aluminum alloys. The Davenport, Iowa plant of Alcoa where they roll heavy plate — they stress relieve mechanically. Six-inch-thick plate, ten feet wide. They have huge hydraulic jacks in a room about half the size of a football field. They grab the plate and pull it three percent. Figure out the force: 70 ksi yield, ten feet wide, five or six inches thick — millions and millions of pounds. A lot of force to pull these things apart. But getting rid of residual stresses is something you need to do.

§3.p9

You can also peen. We don't build battleships anymore, but they used to peen them. If I went back to my old Burstal and Adams Welding Metallurgy book — Burstal was the guy who wrote about weldability of steels in the 1940s — that little list of things, it says "peening necessary." You fill up the bottom part of your weld and you come in and beat the surface to relieve the residual stresses.


§4. Peening titanium and the CF-30 in the Vietnam War [16:15]

§4.p1

When I worked at the Naval Air Rework Facility one summer between my freshman and sophomore years, they had a CF-30 engine — middle of the Vietnam War, they needed to get these back out so they could get shot down again. They had a shortage of CF-30s. They completely rebuilt the engine, it was in the shipping area ready to go, and the final inspector says, there's a crack on one of the vanes on the end of the compressor, made out of titanium. Filled up with a black goo plastic for dampening purposes.

§4.p2

They decided they didn't want to take two or three weeks to disassemble and rebuild it, they needed it out in the fleet. So the boss — Roy was his name, he had twenty engineers, and I was just a summer intern, the low man on the totem pole — Roy says, you're going to handle this weld repair. He explained we were going to use an Almen gage. Almen — a General Motors guy, look it up, developed in the fifties or sixties. You take a little strip of steel, a sixteenth of an inch, and if you peen the surface — like shot blasting — you get a curvature from the residual stresses. The intensity of the shot peen is proportional to the curvature.

§4.p3

So we made up a little tool with a hammer on the end of a vibrating air hammer, found this old ball-peen anvil, and he would cover the surface, peening it. I was supposed to sit there and measure the height of the Almen gage. We were setting up a procedure to do the titanium. The data was all over the map. Press soft, press hard, do it for fifteen seconds, do it for thirty seconds — the heights were all over the map.

§4.p4

Then: how do I do it on the titanium? They had a guy weld it. You can see the weld bead. We can't grind it off, we're just going to leave it. But we had to do the peening. Now, scientifically, on a flat surface it's a bulge — he's got a weld bead reinforcement on what was thin material, just a thirty-second of an inch reinforcement, but now he has to peen an uneven surface. That's going to make it more inconsistent.

§4.p5

So I had to go out, representing the engineering department, and watch this guy peen it for a certain amount of time. Then I came back in and Roy says, sign this. I said, what's that? He had a signature line for two signatures, and he says, that's signing that we've repaired this weld. I didn't know anything about welding at that point. I said, what happens if I sign? He says, if this plane goes down, it'll be a deal within twenty-four hours.

§4.p6

That's how things really get fixed when you need to fix them. Roy had been in the business for forty years. We were taking some risk, but it wasn't a big risk. I've learned since and realized it wasn't really that big a risk, but I didn't know that then. I trusted Roy. If I had to do it today, knowing what I know about fracture mechanics — we just rewrote our liability laws for professional engineers. We have a statute of repose now: engineers can't be held legally liable past, I think, twenty-five years.


§5. Professional liability and the loose bolt [21:34]

§5.p1

In aviation, places like Cessna would have all gone broke because of lawsuits any time a pilot did something stupid. The Federal Aviation Administration has done lots of studies on why private aircraft go down — eighty-five percent of the time it's pilot error. Most of the rest of the time it's the A&P, the airframe and powerplant mechanic. Mechanics make mistakes too.

§5.p2

Just last week or so, someone called me up. I'll write a paper, I won't say too much, but it's a piece of farm equipment, about $700,000, only had a hundred hours on it. A bolt came loose, and everybody agrees that when the bolt came loose in the engine, it started a fire and destroyed the $700,000 piece of machinery. They moved it forty miles on a flatbed truck to a shop to do a teardown inspection. Everybody agrees, this bolt allowed the diesel fuel from the engine to get out, found an ignition source, and started a fire. The guy was riding the machine through the fields, got out, tried to put it out by throwing dirt on top of the engine.

§5.p3

The attorney for the defense of the manufacturer's theory is, when they put it on the flatbed trailer to move it down the highway, that's when the bolt vibrated loose. I said, that's a really good theory — they've now changed an assembly defect into a design defect. They're saying, this vehicle is designed to go over the fields with the engine running and vibrate, but going down a highway with the engine not running, the bolts come loose. So you have attorneys who will come up with anything.

§5.p4

We do have, in aviation, the General Aviation Revitalization Act — GARA — from the early nineties. GARA says any part that's eighteen years old or older, you cannot sue for a defect in manufacture. A lot of states have laws that if you buy a manufactured product — a washing machine that lasts ten years — you can't sue for a manufacturing defect. You can still go after a design defect. We do have laws that limit liability, but there's not one that protects professional people that I know of.

§5.p5

One time someone wanted me to work on a commercial job, no litigation, but I had to have professional liability insurance. I went to look — about $500 worth of liability insurance, good for one year. If I ever got sued, I'd have to maintain that insurance for the next fifty years. So to do a $20,000 job, I'd have to pay $50,000 over fifty years for liability insurance. I decided not to get insurance.

§5.p6

One thing is, I never design a part. I can tell what's wrong, and I give some options for what designs could be, but I don't make the final choice. One time I developed a surgical instrument consulting for Johnson & Johnson. They do laser surgery, and metal instruments can bounce the laser off and burn the patient somewhere they didn't want to burn. I came up with a surface coating that absorbed the laser light without reflecting, and we got a patent on it. If Johnson & Johnson ever got sued, I'm not an employee — I could be sued personally. I ended up writing to Johnson & Johnson asking to be held harmless. It took six months in their legal department. They finally gave me a letter saying we'll treat you as if you were an employee — my legal fees would be paid.

§5.p7

You've got to be careful about professional liability. I have an LLC, a limited liability corporation. You hire the LLC, not Tom. I don't keep a lot of money in that account; I transfer it as income to personal. The other thing — I own a condo. If you register your home as a homestead at Middlesex Courthouse, sign a little form and register it with the clerk of court, if you ever get sued for anything — some neighbor's kid falls on the trampoline — they can take all your assets except your house. The government doesn't want to make you homeless. So there are some laws that protect people, but there's powerful lobbying in Congress not to reform a lot of the laws. It's a huge business — tens of billions of dollars in lawyers' fees.


§6. Fatigue design and the Aerostar axle [30:00]

§6.p1

Let me go over fatigue design. Designing for welds that might fatigue — you have some structure that's moving, the welds could fatigue. This is primarily for steels, but it also applies to other alloys. There's a book written on fatigue of welds. Mostly steels. If you look at just a solid bar of steel, the fatigue stress range goes up with the strength of the steel. At 900 megapascals, fatigue is about a forty-five-degree slope — the fatigue strength of a simple solid bar of steel is proportional to the tensile strength.

§6.p2

If you put a hole in it, it goes down by about thirty percent. If you put a weld in it, no matter what the strength of that steel, it's going to behave like it's a low-strength steel. Putting welds in a steel structure will bring everyone back to the equivalent of a mild steel.

§6.p3

To give you an example, in 1985 Ford came up with the Aerostar van, and they were using high-strength low-alloy steel for the first time instead of plain carbon sheet steel. They designed the rear axle to have a fatigue strength proportional to the tensile strength of the better steel — that's what their designers knew. That would be true if it weren't welded, but the rear axle had brackets welded onto it, and they found people throwing axles, fatigue-failing them in the first six months. This was not a great day for Ford. Big product recall. There was a tremendous amount of work done after that on the fatigue strength of sheet metal welds in high-strength low-alloy steels.

§6.p4

You always have a little stress concentration at the weld. Statistically, this area may not be bad, this area is worse — there's always some bad area. You've actually got several types of stress concentration. Geometric stress concentration at the notch — say it's a fillet weld, you've got geometric stress concentration at both corners. Metallurgical stress concentration because you have a different microstructure in the heat-affected zone. You can also have slight undercutting, or as the weld solidifies you can have microcracks, hot shrinkage — less than a human hair, but enough. When all these things line up at the same spot, it doesn't do you any good to weld.


§7. Truck frames and cement-truck water tanks [33:58]

§7.p1

If you look at the frame of a tractor-trailer going down the road, that's a big plate of steel made into a C-channel. The steel frame is ladder-frame construction — a C-channel here, another over here, those are the two ladder rails. Usually a high-strength steel, eighty or ninety ksi. You are not allowed to weld on that. National Highway Transportation Safety Authority — you're not allowed to weld. Some old boy comes along, wants to add a little bracket to the bottom of his truck. He puts a little weld down there, and 100,000 miles later — which is not a lot on a truck — the frame falls apart. You can't weld high-strength steels and keep the strength. You can bolt on it, they put drilled holes in for that, but you don't weld on it.

§7.p2

Automotive is unibody construction. Some pickup trucks don't have the stresses of a big eighteen-wheeler and use welded ladder-frame construction. The Dodge Ram, Chevy Silverado — some of those are welded. But they're welded under very carefully controlled conditions in plant, and they've done fatigue tests so the welds are not in the most stressed locations. On the big eighteen-wheeler frame trucks, I've never seen anything except bolted connections.

§7.p3

You have lots of different geometries of welds. This is one I'll show you later — a cover plate on something, and you're not allowed to weld around the corner. You weld just the two sides, leave the corner alone, because of residual stresses. There are sometimes hard spots — on board ship you might have something holding something else and the weld stops right here. That's a hard spot, a stress concentration, and that's where the failure starts. You have a lot of these on ships.

§7.p4

On pressure vessels you put a doubler plate on the shell, and the doubler plate is welded radially. Much lower stress because you're spreading the load over a larger area, not concentrating it on one spot. So there are lots of details you can use to reduce the stress.

§7.p5

I had a situation once on cement trucks. They have a 200-gallon tank of water, and they use air pressure from the air brakes — the truck has 55 psi air to run the brakes. In some residential parts of the country it says "air brakes not allowed," because if you've ever heard a truck with air brakes, it's pretty noisy. So you have this 55 psi air, and cement trucks always have people spilling cement, so they carry this 200-gallon tank of water with hoses they can pressurize. About the pressure of your garden hose. They take it, spray off the truck, so they don't get cement caked on it. When they really have a problem they often carry a couple gallons of muriatic acid — HCl, hydrochloric acid — but you'll see corrosion if they don't rinse with water.

§7.p6

A guy came back from Iraq, was working as a welder in Pennsylvania. They had a tank with a leak. The tank was made out of aluminum. Officially you were supposed to send them back to the company, because they wanted to sell you a new tank. These things were always fatiguing — vibrating going down the road with 200 gallons of water in them, it's a big heavy thing. The ASME boiler and pressure vessel code requires doubler plates on end caps — if you have a nozzle penetrating the wall of your tank, you have a doubler plate, you fillet weld here, fillet weld here, so you don't have a sharp stress concentration. Required under the ASME code. But ASME code excludes water tanks.

§7.p7

The company out in Iowa making these was sort of a mom-and-pop shop. They asked the Department of Transportation, which regulates trucks on the highway, what design rules they had to follow. DOT said, that's just an appendage, that's just something you're carrying — nothing to do with the truck going down the highway. It's like throwing a water tank in the back of your pickup truck; we don't regulate what you put in the back of your pickup. Then they called Pennsylvania, said we've got this vessel carrying water. Pennsylvania said water vessels are excluded from the boiler and pressure vessel code. So no doubler plates.

§7.p8

The guy making this decision wasn't an engineer. The company didn't have an engineer. They were buying hydraulics from one company, tires from another, assembling components. The guy making the decision was their attorney, looking at the regulations. He had no engineering training. He made the decision: simple design, no doubler plates.

§7.p9

So this guy in Pennsylvania is fixing some of the welds — fractures all the time. The attorney for the company actually had a nice business selling replacement tanks. He's welding on this and goes to check if he fixed the leak. He's supposed to use 5 psi, but he had 100 psi on it — he blows the tank up. The end cap comes off, blows him fifty yards away against a concrete wall, in four pieces. He survived three years in Iraq getting shot at and didn't survive welding in Pennsylvania.

§7.p10

They had actually had an accident once before — the company would do a pressure test on these tanks before sending them out. They'd cut a guy's leg off when one let go, but he wasn't killed. The attorney decided it must be a fluke and ordered that all future pressure tests be done inside a cage, in case they had another fluke.

§7.p11

When you fill up the tire on a big eighteen-wheeler, by OSHA you must do that inside a cage — one-inch heavy-wall steel bars — because that tire goes like a bomb, people get killed standing next to it. So it turns out it was a mom-and-pop design, they didn't have a clue. The attorney didn't have a clue. I only got involved because I was working with a guy in California, Roger, who used to be on the main committee of the boiler and pressure vessel code. He called Pennsylvania. Under Pennsylvania law, this tank should have been required to meet the ASME code, even though ASME code excluded the particular application. It was a quirk of Pennsylvania law. So it wasn't a legal tank.

§7.p12

The real problem Roger realized was, how many of these are out there? A hundred thousand cement trucks all over the country. Roger goes to his friend, head of the National Board of Pressure Vessel Inspectors, and says, we've got a hundred thousand bombs out there, we need to get them inspected. And the guy says, we can't do it — we don't have enough pressure vessel inspectors in all the states to take on an extra hundred thousand vessels. Some of the complications when you have lawyers doing the design.

§7.p13

Student: Why did it fail — was the weld weakening it?

§7.p14

The weld wasn't great. But the real reason was, the thing was designed for 55 psi, and if you put 100 psi in it — that's the test pressure he was supposed to have a regulator on. It would limit to 5 psi, and the tank would have taken 5 psi, and they would have found there were new leaks. But he put 100 psi on it. No one's really allowed to know exactly, but we think he connected the air pressure, went off to do something else, and was standing in the wrong spot when it let go. The welds weren't great either. Repair welds were not so good. Steel isn't that hard to weld — you can learn to weld steel reasonably in a couple of weeks, in fact the shipyard welding programs run two weeks. There are some businesses where you go to school for one day and learn. To do a good job, you need six months. Titanium is harder than aluminum. It's actually easier to make a good-looking titanium weld; it's hard to get a non-contaminated one. We'll talk about that.


§8. Fatigue details and the King Street Bridge [48:47]

§8.p1

You've seen this detail — rat holes or mouse holes. You don't like intersecting welds. Sometimes you have to have intersecting welds, but you'd rather have a half-circle hole than two intersecting welds, because intersecting welds have tremendous residual stresses. This is out of the civil engineers' steel construction manual — there's a chapter on fatigue. You can look at loading conditions: your bridge or your building is going to see less than 100,000 cycles, less than half a million, less than two million, or over two million cycles. That's your loading condition. Then you come over to another table that goes on for pages. Plain material is stress category A. Put a weld in it and all of a sudden it's down at stress category B.

§8.p2

This should eventually get out — it's in the structural welding code, AWS D1.1, the red, white, and black book. They have similar things. Stress categories down to E and F, fatigue curves for the different categories — S-N curves. You can draw a picture for each. Stress category A is a built-up member, simple double butt weld in axial tension, something in bending, fillet weld built-up member; here's that doubler plate where you don't weld across the front, you don't go around the corners — I'll show you why. You can usually find a joint detail similar to something in your structure, and it will tell you a factor for the fatigue strength. For carbon steel, the fatigue strength goes from about twenty-one ksi without a weld down to maybe seven for a complex weld geometry. A factor of three reduction in the stress you can tolerate, depending on the geometry of the structure and where the weld is located.

§8.p3

You have to pay attention to design for fatigue. This is the King Street Bridge in Melbourne, Australia. I think it failed in the late 1970s. Cars going across the bridge, a major thoroughfare. Brittle fracture going out through here. Here's your weld detail — doubler plate, on the bottom flange, probably a cover plate. It had a hydrogen crack from welding, grew by fatigue to a critical size, and then bang. They lost a major thoroughfare for about a year. Since then you're not allowed to put the weld going across that direction — you weld in this direction and this direction, because the corners are tremendous sources of hydrogen cracks and fatigue. Certain types of details are forbidden, not because someone calculated it one day, but because something failed. That's how codes and standards are developed — it's experience. Someone has a failure, we go study why.


§9. *To Engineer is Human* and the Thresher [53:29]

§9.p1

Henry Petroski, a guy at Duke University in the civil engineering department, wrote a book called To Engineer is Human. He's gotten famous off it, elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The book is about how we learn to engineer new structures from failures. We learn from the Sea Wolf problem — expensive lesson to learn, but we learned a lot about welding high-strength steels we didn't know about. We learn about process control from the Thresher — the whole SUBSAFE program came out of the Thresher disaster.

§9.p2

The Thresher was built up here in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. I was living in Virginia Beach, mid-sixties. It was on its first controlled deep dive, and they don't — I don't remember all the details. A couple of students over the years have chosen it for their presentation. They had a hard time even recovering parts of it. One theory is it was a bad braze joint in one of the seawater piping penetrations through the main pressure hull — four- or six-inch pipe just brazed. The Navy in the SUBSAFE program redesigned that. Rickover was still around, still in charge, and they shut down submarine construction for about a year and a half to three years. A lot of the manufacturing management techniques used commercially in the 1990s, the US Navy developed them under Rickover in the 1960s because of the Thresher.

§9.p3

They think there was a major penetration into the reactor compartment, they lost power. They didn't have the pumps to blow out the ballast tanks enough, and they were on a slope coming up, because they had a tender right above them that knew what was going on. They could hear from her sonar — these guys screaming inside the sub. They were on a slope toward the surface, but they hadn't been able to blow enough water out of the ballast tanks. They went up and they came back down.

§9.p4

Student: So the issue — over thirty percent of these joints were failing inspection tests. And if a seawater connected system fails, you spray onto the breakers that control your reactor — reactor scram. So you've lost propulsion. The ship initiates procedures for coming shallow: put up angle, use the momentum. But they tried to actuate an emergency main ballast tank blow, and at the time they didn't have the same kind of air controls we have for our emergency systems now. They suspect there was moisture in the high-pressure air, and a small pipe meeting froze with moisture inside — the pipes froze, couldn't actuate the blow. So at angle, the result was failure to initiate emergency main ballast tank blow. The means of their communication with the surface ship — they lost contact. The sub essentially slipped back down. It was trying to go up, but slips and plummets directly downward, past test depth, breaks into two pieces.

§9.p5

That's more detail than I'd ever heard before. For a long time some of that was classified — until probably the 1980s it was really hush-hush. The part that was hidden was to protect the Navy from embarrassment. But in fact the welds were terrible. It wouldn't surprise me if that's one of the reasons they eventually shut that shipyard down. Terrible quality control. A lot of the quality management systems in place throughout the United States — all the stuff with the Japanese and their quality control techniques — came out of the SUBSAFE program. Rickover was leading that, he had a blank check from Congress, and he didn't want to be embarrassed again. It was tragic. One of the tragedies is the people on the tender could hear it. From sonar records they think what they really heard was the sounds of the sub collapsing.

§9.p6

I personally heard that recording, given mostly to the command. You can actually hear the captain narrating as the pressure hull was collapsing. I heard it in a Navy annual training video.

Cases referenced

  • Cardiac guide wire (stainless steel weld failure) §1.p1

    Physical demonstration. Tom passes around a 25-year-old guide wire whose weld tip failed at less than 2.5 lb. 304 stainless, very fine coiled wire. Anchor for lawsuit anecdote (surgeon left 30 inches inside patient).

  • Cow magnet (stainless-steel magnet demonstration) §1.p4

    Physical demonstration. Stainless-steel magnet swallowed by dairy cattle to capture stray ferrous wire and protect the udders. Used as an aside off the guide-wire topic.

  • John Galati torpedo tube welding (Electric Boat) §2.p2

    Student-of-Tom anecdote. Balanced-weld procedure (alternating clock positions around the circumference) developed for ~40-foot-long torpedo tubes to control distortion.

  • Davenport Iowa Alcoa plate stress relief §3.p8

    Mechanical stress relief example. Six-inch plate, ten feet wide, pulled 3% in hydraulic jacks the size of half a football field. Used as the canonical case of mechanical (not thermal) stress relief in heavy aluminum plate.

  • Naval Air Rework Facility CF-30 weld repair (Vietnam War) §4.p1

    Tom's first-summer-as-intern story. Final-inspection crack in titanium compressor vane, repair by welding and shot peening using an Almen gage, Tom asked to sign off as engineer of record. Anchors the entire §4 narrative on shot peening and the §5 transition to liability.

  • Loose-bolt $700,000 farm equipment engine fire §5.p2

    Current consulting case (referenced as "last week"). Bolt-came-loose engine fire on $700k farm equipment, 100 hours old. Defense attorney's theory converts an assembly defect into a design defect via the flatbed-transport argument.

  • Johnson & Johnson laser-surgery instrument coating §5.p6

    Patent and held-harmless arrangement. Tom developed an anti-reflective surface coating for J&J laser surgical instruments to prevent burn injury from reflected laser energy. Took six months of J&J legal department to issue a hold-harmless letter.

  • 1985 Ford Aerostar rear axle fatigue §6.p3

    Welded rear axle of HSLA steel, designed assuming fatigue strength proportional to tensile strength. Brackets welded onto axle; field failures in first six months. Big product recall. Triggered industry-wide work on fatigue of welded HSLA sheet.

  • Pennsylvania cement-truck water tank explosion §7.p5

    Extended teaching case. Aluminum water tank, no doubler plates, regulatory gap (DOT defers to ASME, ASME excludes water tanks, Pennsylvania attorney reads regs and concludes no code applies). Iraq-veteran welder killed during 100 psi over-pressure test repair. Earlier near-miss (leg amputation) had been attributed to a fluke; company responded by building a test cage. Tom got involved through Roger, ex-ASME committee. Hundred thousand similar vehicles on the road; National Board of Pressure Vessel Inspectors says they can't be inspected at that scale.

  • King Street Bridge (Melbourne) §8.p3

    Brittle fracture of welded bridge in Melbourne, late 1970s. Doubler-plate detail with weld going across the loaded direction; hydrogen crack from welding grew by fatigue to critical size. Major thoroughfare lost for ~1 year. Used to justify the welding-detail prohibition (don't weld around the corners).

  • USS Thresher §9.p1

    Closing case. Built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard; lost on first controlled deep dive in the mid-1960s. Tom names the failed-braze-joint theory on seawater piping penetration. Detailed in-class explanation from a (Navy-trained) student covers ~30% inspection failure rate on seawater joints, reactor scram, ice in emergency MBT blow air system, failure to surface, breakup at test depth. SUBSAFE program and modern quality-management practices came out of this disaster. Tom alludes to a recording of the sub captain narrating hull collapse.

  • USS Sea Wolf (welding lessons) §9.p1

    Brief reference. Source of lessons on welding high-strength steels. Used as a parallel to the Thresher in Petroski's framing of "we learn from failure."

  • Tractor-trailer frame welding violations §7.p1

    General principle illustration. NHTSA-prohibited welding on HSLA tractor-trailer ladder frames; aftermarket welds cause failure at ~100k miles.

  • Surgical instruments (general scissors-class consulting) §5.p6

Layer 2 — cleanup edit
p1 00:04

Ready, anyway, so here's another little quiz. We're talking about stainless steels and this is a guide wire. Anybody ever had any heart surgery? This is a guide wire. So they come in through a big artery in your leg and they snake these little stainless steel wires, teflon-coated. This is an old one, it's like twenty-five years old, then a problem welding tips. The thing is very flexible at the top. Don't take it all the way out of this thing — it's insane today. Back in this is just a storage thing, but then one, this one wire teflon-coated up through your vein, this is the guide wire, which they can buy various techniques.

p2 00:48

Mo, we get asked Neil because he's a radiologist. But the radiologist, the surgeon will essentially take these through the arteries, get something in here, then they use this as sort of a transport rope to send other things up there. They do send a balloon up there, you know, to probably put a stent in your heart or something in it. So this is a guide wire, and they were having problems, the weld from breaking. It lets up two and a half pounds, they didn't want to do that. This is nominally austenitic stainless steel 304, which we all think of as on that, showed you to think before. This is fairly non-magnetic.

p3 01:35

Okay, and the reason is this is very fine wire coil to make it flexible, it's like a little coil spring with another wire kind of down with the center. It was, well, we think one spring, a little weird fine wire to the center, that was having problems.

p4 01:54

I actually have a new one, I got two new ones because there's a lawsuit went on about some guy who supposedly got an errant operation, they left about thirty inches of it in part. Okay, but they sue anyway. They cost $1,500 just that. Of course it comes in, you might know what this is. [Tom produces a magnet.] It's a magnet. I'll tell you, a stainless steel magnet. So none of you grew up on a farm. This is how I make is that, it goes to their head. Well, goes to sea water, house? No, Bigelow, LOL. That's what I fell us, what it's like.

p5 02:43

This is where the dairy cattle, you make them swallow this, they're bigger so they can slowly, and it goes in. And it turns out, when they're out there grazing in the grass sometimes they'll pick up some wire or something from the fence, it will cut it or left around. And if that gets into their udders and stuff, it will destroy their udders and they're not much good as milk cow at that point. So they basically, this stainless steel magnet grabs on to the carbon steel that they might eat, and it will hold it in the stomach. The stainless steel doesn't corrode in stomach acid, but the stainless and carbon steel go, see this is a groan or so, now you know.

p6 03:23

Okay, so this whole sounds in this field, no it's gross. That's the way to get iron in there. But no, that's not. Put any way, is you go to Amazon. No, I told a couple people this cow Maggie, they couldn't, they wouldn't believe it. Okay, but they don't believe it when I tell. White House, why 7-Up was named 7-Up. You might know why 7-Up's name something up, because you just have lithium in it, was supper, you could buy as a soft drink in the 1930s. Okay, lithium is an antidepressant, and tell the government came along, said you guys take a look, email. They used to, you could go buy your upper, the mr. Coca-Cola, that's right. Coca-Cola, you know what has a good look at it. Cocaine is not really cocaine, posted what is m1 same point. It was, Coke [Coca-Cola] was invented by a druggist in Georgia at a pharmacy soda fountain, when he picks up himself. That's why the former state secret NASA, actually the Coca-Cola formula is one of the type in most tightly kept secrets in the world. Their vault in Atlanta.

p7 04:45

Okay, I wanted to mention some things about stress relief. Well, so this applies all welds, not just, who actually, we want to talk about stainless steels. You don't want to stress relieve stainless steel because it's awesome a stainless steel — you're going to be right in the sensitization range. Okay, so you can destroy the corrosion resistance by doing a thermal stress relief. But stress relief in welding is needed, because if I have a joint, no angle, no angle, how to do some sort of electron beam weld, there's almost no distortion, the stuff shrinks a little bit because it contracts on solidification. But if I have a small angle or a large angle, I'll get more and more distortion because I get a V-shaped weld. Bigger the V you get, more contraction. Steel's about three and a half percent contraction on solidification, aluminum six percent. Aluminum has much bigger distortion problems than steel.

p8 05:47

So here's another picture. You got to balance welds. Okay, B-B groove weld, and if you just weld this way, start on one side, starting the same side, start of this side, when you're all done, even when you fill up the other side, it never comes all the way back. The sharper here when you're only halfway welding, even if you do it on this side, if you, okay, well this side and that side, that, that's what you guys can always flip the ship around. Okay, do that. But I mentioned to you how one of my students John Galati goes my first endeavor, basically at Electric Boat, developed ways to weld the tubes for the torpedo tubes, like forty feet of water. So whenever point they are, and they had to weld several tubes together, and he would basically balance the welds on either side as he was going around the circle. You might do a well at the three o'clock, measure the eclipse, change it, an inch goes well to nine o'clock or even, balance the welds as you go around to get rid of the distortion problem.

p9 06:57

But in fact, you run into, you have a choice in life in welding and distortion and residual stresses: you can either have residual stresses and no distortion, or you can have a lot of distortion and no residual stresses. But actually it's more complex than that. You don't have quite that choice. Thicker materials are so rigid and stiff that when you weld them, once you start building up the thickness, and let's say you're welding something four inches thick, once you put a two-inch weld in there, it's not going to bend anymore. Okay, it's got, it brings a solid rigid structure. Whereas thin material, sheet metal, eighth-inch material, you're welding on one pass and it will distort. So thin material tends to distort, thick material tends to have residual stresses. You can play the two of them off against each other by your welding sequence and whatnot, but the worst thickness of all, the most difficult to deal with, is about three-eighths of an inch or one centimeter. All you surface ships guys, what's the thing to say your home.

p10 08:04

You just happen to have the worst kind of thickness, in terms of you get a fair amount of distortion and you can get some residual stresses. Some guys, they got residual stresses big time, and now people are making eighth-inch steel ships. Anyway, so here's actual pictures of welds. This is actually in 5083 aluminum, and so they have a fairly deep penetrating weld, very parallel, no distortion. When you get parallel sides weld, you can reshape, well, we start seeing some distortion. You get thicker and you get more and more, and thicker and you get more and more distortion.

p11 08:57

Well, when you have residual stresses, you can lose fatigue, stress, fracture toughness, relieve lots of things. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, if you're building pressure vessels, basically requires you stress relieve anything above an inch-and-a-half thick. Okay, I will tell you the hull of a sub is more than an inch and I'll tell you how much more. Okay, knowing that, how do we usually stress relieve welds?

p12 09:36

Yeah, post weld heat treatment. Okay, and post for steel carbon steels, alloys, deals, post weld heat treatment. We pre-heat steels to drive the hydrogen off. We post heat them to soften the material if it's a really highly alloyed steel. But we also post weld heat treat, and it turns out, once you get to inch and a quarter, inch and a half, you're going to have yield level residual stresses in there. I mean, the material is certain plastically deformed as you continue to put weld bead center. You go four inches, I guarantee you got residual stresses that are equal to the yield strength of the material on the seat. And in complex three-dimensional crank type of structure, you're going to have, you can have tri-axial, and so the material is not performing, you can have stresses. If I made a big heavy HY-112, but I have zero stresses, 120, 130 ksi in a complex shape, fundamental ribs, a crepe technical sergeant.

p13 10:51

So typically for things that are inch and a half, ASME boiler pressure code says you must stress relieve to meet the code. Some rays are our submarines, especially. You don't put them, special moments alcohol prior to and after. That's for pretty closely. As opposed to heat, that's not post weld heat treatment in the eleven, twelve hundred degree range, that's our three, four hundred degrees to keep the hydrogen out, right? Okay, so you can preheat and you low temperature post weld heat treatment, they controlled hydrogen to diffuse it out, and just put a little blankets on there right around the weld. You don't stress relieve the whole vessel.

p14 11:35

And in fact, for thermal stress relief, they do exactly what you, go to bed for big. This is pressure vessel shop, and they have, beer than us, here's a vessel, and here they're putting the blankets all the way around. After they weld do the whole thing, they're going to heat this thing up to 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, and per hour of thickness typically, and wrap it. They build a furnace around it. They just have, they're like welding power supplies, just like your freaking electric power supplies, and lay it ship here are the sub rates up here, and they tend to use electrical three meters. So the surface ships, like on, you're going to explain preheating, okay, certainly in a commercial yard. I don't know whether they're doing in the service shipyards right now claim. But so you build it, you put insulation and you build your furnace around the vessel.

p15 12:33

Or in some places they have huge vessels — you there, Babcock & Wilcox or something like that — they'll have a heat treating furnace that's the size of a two-story house, and they can put the whole vessel right inside that furnace. This happens to be a portable. This company up here on some stress relieving services, okay, will come and build a box. This is about the size of a railroad car, and they have railroad tracks. In this case the box, the furnace, slides over the vessel. Sometimes I have the vessel hardware retracted, goes into the box, okay. But you put the whole thing and heat it up for 1400 degrees, might take a day or two days to heat the whole thing up, and hold it there for a couple of hours. But you need to thermally stress relieve.

p16 13:23

How are you stress, how do you stress relieve a sub? Even if your, so you do, and you do it on the first deep dive. It's mechanical stress relief. Okay, it's full of residual stresses until you go down deep, and the whole thing gets squeezed, and those areas that are high tensile stress when you put it in big compression, because it the yield, and there isn't, what you have, a yielding in tension. Okay, you have to equilibrium of forces. For all you mechanical engineers, you have to have equilibrium of forces. If you have tensile residual stresses here, you've got to balance them with an equal amount of compressive forces, okay. So if you go and compress something at a fairly high stress level, which is at full ball, the compressed areas are going to yield. And as they yield, when they come back up, there's less residual stress. So you can mechanically relieve residual stresses.

p17 14:28

And I'm going to talk about that more when we get to the aluminum alloys, the wings of, I told you about the Davenport, Iowa plant of the Alcoa where they roll, I told you about the plate problem where they're heat treating the plate, they stress relieve the plate. But they do it mechanically. Six inch thick plate, ten feet wide, and they have these hydraulic jacks up into the room about half the size of a football field. Great big hydraulic jacks, they grab the plate, and then pull it three percent. Start figuring out the force, at seventy ksi yield, and ksi thousand, 1735 tons per square inch, five or six inches thick, ten or four people, figure out the force, it's millions and millions of pounds, or maybe million times. I remember a lot of force to pull these things apart. But getting rid of residual stresses is something you need to do.

p18 15:31

You can also peen — we didn't, battleships, you know, you don't build them anymore — but we know they used to peen. If I went back to my burst out and Adams kept stuff dirty, my heart anymore, this was the guy who talked about weldability of steels in the 1940s, in that little list of things which you can now get on the seller, but it says peening necessary. Well, peening is a way, peening is, make your part of your weld, you fill up the bottom part of your weld, and you come in here and you beat the surface to relieve the residual stresses.

p19 16:15

When I worked at the Naval Air Rework Facility one summer between my freshman and sophomore years, they had a CF-30 engine, which one in what they wear correct I went into, but it was the middle of the Vietnam War and they needed to get these back so he can get shot down again, right? So they had a shortage of CF-30s at the time, and they completely rebuild the engine, all is in the shipping area ready to go. Some final inspector goes, this is a crack on one of the vanes from the end of compressor, made out of titanium. It's filled up with this black goo type of plastic for dampening purposes or whatever. It's titanium, and we haven't talked about shielding for titanium, but they're going to have to.

p20 17:04

They decide they don't want to take the two or three weeks to disassemble the thing and rebuild it, and they need, they needed it out there in the fleet, so they decided the boss gives us, civilian working for the day, the boss Roy, at River was Left standing. But Roy and I was his with twenty engineers, and I was just a summer intern engineer, I was an engineer or just an intern, but I was the lowman totem pole. Everybody says, well, you're going to have to worry about this weld repair. And so he explained that we're going to get an Almen gage now. Engages, this strip of steel, guide General Motors name Almen, look it up, on the rule I've developed in the fifties or sixties. We'll take a little strip, and if you peen the surface, if you have like shot blasting the surface, you'll get a curvature from the residual stresses.

p21 18:06

So you start with a little sixteenth inch, they can see the piece of steel. The intensity of the shock peen is going to be proportional to the curvature that piece states, okay, because, how much compressive stress get out, and it goes, it bends up when you're all done. So I went out, I spent a day in tech there in the shipyard or the air rework, sits there, and he made up a little tool with a little hammer on the end of a vibrating air hammer, and we just found this at old ball onion, and he would just cover the surface, peening the surface, and I was supposed to sit there and measure the height of the Almen gage, and how long, the boy Wallace on the track, sizing, you know, the song was taken. You were just setting up a procedure to do the titanium. Okay, well, the data was all over the book, okay. I had to plot it, it's all over everywhere, we couldn't get any reproducible. You press soft, press hard, you know, do it for fifteen seconds, do it for thirty seconds, measure the height of the Almen gage, call my boss, well, minutes all over the map. So I tell you, enjoyed that.

p22 19:11

Okay, well, now do I do it on the titanium? Well, okay, they had a guy come in and he welded it. He done the weld repair, you can see the weld bead. Can't get in there and grind it off, you're just going to leave it there. But we had to do peening. So now scientists, a flat surface, it's a bulge, he's got a weld bead reinforcements. I mean, when this was thin material, so it's just a little thirty-second of an inch reinforcement, but now he has to do it on an uneven surface rather than the even surface. So you know, that's going to make it foodporn more consistent, right? All right, so I had to go out and be the engineer representing the engineering department and watch this guy peen it for a certain amount of time. And then I came back in and Roy says, sign this. And I said, well, what's that? He said, and he had our assignment, okay, into two signatures, and he says, that's signing that we had repaired this weld. I didn't know anything about welding at that point, the only thing about anything. And I said, what happens if I signed? He says, this plane goes down, it'll be a deal within twenty-four hours. Oh, sorry.

p23 20:21

Oh, but just so you know how things are really fixed, okay, when you need to fix them. You just sort of go with, and Roy had been in the business for forty years, okay. So yeah, we were taking some risk, but it wasn't that big a risk. And if you actually, I've learned since and realized how it wasn't really that big of risk, but you never know, I didn't know. But I sort of trusted Roy. In actually, if I had to do it today, before I, over today, how would it go? Okay, I know what about fracture mechanics. We just rewrote our liability laws of professional engineers, and now we have a statute of repose. Engineers can't be held legally come over past, you know, I think it's twenty-five or fifty years for that, once a year. So if you guys gonna be home early to Sox water working, or if you have a, no we got mortared.

p24 21:34

All right, yeah, and if they're not going, no we don't, we do have something in aviation, because places, piece of people like Cessna and each crab, they're all one broke because there would mean suit anytime some pilot does something stupid. Then you have to remember, they've been lots of studies by the Federal Aviation Administration of the reason private aircraft go down — eighty-five percent of times pilot error, okay. And then most of the rest of time it's the A&P, the airframe, the powerplant, the mechanic. In the aviation business, the mechanic is the AMP center, aircraft and powerplant. He's certified as an aircraft technician or mechanical, and they make mistakes too, okay. Actually I have something I just got, someone forgot to tighten both, trying to remember. Just the last week or so, someone called me up and it's clear that, oh, it's a commercial, see, I will run a paper, I won't say too much about what is part of this piece of farm equipment, about $700,000, and it only had a hundred hours on it. And a bolt came loose, and everybody agrees, when the bolt came was in the engine, it started a fire and destroyed the $700,000 piece of machinery, was only a hundred hours old.

p25 23:09

They moved it forty miles on a flatbed truck to a shop where they could do a teardown inspection, see what happened and stuff. And everybody, only one who spoke the whole thing and everybody agrees, it's still this bolt that allowed the diesel fuel from the engine to get out, from top of the inventory got plenty of ignition sources and started a fire. And the guy was riding machine through the fields at the time, and he got out, tried to put it out by throwing dirt on top of the engine, you know, to stop the fire. And thereby increases the loose bolt. The attorney for the defense of the manufacturer of this machine going to be sued for, the bolt's loose, machine, because of your loose bolt, the leaf, you'll destroy our machine. The attorney's theory is, when he put it on the trailer to move over the burden of palm down the highway, the bolt that single bowl vibrate, pollutes. Okay, I said, that's a really good theory. So they'll certified of that, stipulated, I think we can go that they designed to be. They now change the assembly defect into a design defect, okay, because they're saying, this vehicle, this is designed to go over the fields with the engine running, is going to vibrate so much going down a highway with the engine not running, okay, then the bolts are going to come loose, right? I, you, hiding, I can be safer now.

p26 24:48

So you got attorneys who will come up with anything. We do have in aviation, in 1992 or night and early nineties, they came up with VRA, a General Aviation Revitalization Act, okay, GARA. GARA says any part that has, that's eighteen years old or older, you cannot sue for a defect in manufacturer. And a lot of states have laws that, if you buy manufactured product, the washing machine that lasts for ten years, you can't sue for a manufacturing defect, okay. Now, you can go after a design defect or something. If you can't sue for a manufacturing, you're talking about professional liability, what's a little bit different, but we do have laws that limit liability for things. But there's not one that protects professional people that I know.

p27 25:50

In fact, one time someone told me they wanted me to work on job, and they said it was commercial job, was a no litigation job. They said you have to have a, well, you know, a liability insurance, professional liability insurance. So I went out to look and see, it's got a copy, $500 to your liability insurance. And then I learned that would be good for one year, and if I ever got sued, I'd have to have that liability insurance for the next fifty years. So to do this $20,000 job, I'm going to have to pay over the next fifty years to, or $50,000 for liability insurance. So I decided not get insurance, okay. And I wrote back and said, I don't have insurance. He said, well, you're supposed to have insurance, I can't remember how I solved the problem, something, I've actually copula, I'm not going to go buy insurance, okay.

p28 26:44

One thing is, I never designed for part. I can tell what a-what from is, and I give some options of what something, what some designs could be, but I don't think the final choice, okay. One time I was so surprised, I've developed the holes are instant instrument as consulting for Johnson & Johnson down here. And this is when they do laser surgery, this, you've got metal instruments and lasers can bounce off that and could burn someone, some part where they want to hit the tissue but they hit the instrument and reflected off and burn the patient somewhere, and they didn't want to do so. They were trying to design a, that wouldn't do that, so I came up with a surface coating that absorbed the laser light without reflecting, and we got a patent on it. And was that an issue, that sort of thing? Oh, if Johnson & Johnson ever get sued, I'm not an employee of Johnson & Johnson, I could be sued personally, attorneys. So I end up writing a letter with Johnson & Johnson, said, hey, I want to be held harmless if you guys ever get sued over this product. It took them six months in their legal department. They finally gave me a copy of a letter saying, we will treat you just as if you were employed, okay, thanks. Basically my legal fees would be paid, be taken over by Johnson & Johnson, okay.

p29 28:07

But you got to be careful about professional liability, okay. We have a, well, I now have an LLC, a limited liability corporation. And so you hire not Tom, either you hire either LLC, and the LLC, hey, do you want my bank account, okay. I don't keep a lot of money in that account. Once I transfer it as an income to point personal. And I, other thing you guys, I don't know, I, me own a condo. If you have, here at Middlesex Courthouse, and you register that as your homestead, sign a little form they give you and register it within the clerk of court down there, if you ever do get sued for anything, some neighbor's kid falls on the trampoline or whatever, they can take all your assets except your house. The government does not want to put, make you homeless, okay. So they go for the home, of course, then you can't pay the taxes, or even if you bet you'll be bankrupt at your house anyway. So there are some laws that protect, are there are some laws that protect people, but it's actually fairly progressive of Canada to the particular. You're more progressive than you know, okay, we're way behind on our legal liability. So in part because there is a very powerful lobbying in Congress, do not reform a lot of loss. It is a huge business, eight, tens of billions of dollar business or Clemson terms, okay. I work for places I guess, okay.

p30 30:00

Let me go over a fatigue design. So designing for welds, that might fatigue, as you have some structure that's moving the show, the welds could fatigue. And there's an itching thing now, this is twice primarily two steels, but it also applies to hold on alloys. I'll go over some stuff when we get to aluminum, but this comes out of a book like this. That's one on hydrogen cracking, but there's one, a book written on fatigue of welds. And it's mostly steels, but it turns out, if you look at just a single bar steel, you will find that the pencils are, the stress range for the fatigue, it goes up with the strength of the steel. So if I got 900 megapascals, fatigue is about a forty-five-degree slope, the fatigue strength of a simple solid bar steel is going to be proportional to the tensile strength.

p31 30:55

If you put a hole in it, you find it goes down, and it goes down by about thirty percent, okay. If you put a weld in it, you find it, no matter what the strength of that steel is, it's going to behave like it's a little strength steel, okay. Putting welds in a steel structure will bring everyone back to equilibrium of the row, certain steel. And to give you an example, in 1985 Ford came up with the Aerostar van, and they were using high strength low-alloy steel for the first time, right here, old carbon steel sheet. And they designed the rear axle to have a fatigue strength that was better, than was proportional to the tensile strength, because that's what their designers knew. But that's true, that would be true if they had welded it, but the rear axle had some brackets on it welded on, and they found out people through axles with this fatigue off, okay. The first six months, this was not in the day for Ford, okay, banana product recalls up. And there was tremendous amount of work done on the fatigue strength of sheet metal welds of high strength low-alloy steels.

p32 32:30

It turns out, you always had a little stress concentration to fill that weld, and statistically this little area may not be bad, the bad area is worse, and there's always some area. And you've actually got several types of stress concentration. You've got a geometric stress concentration at the notch, okay, so let's just say it's a fillet weld. I've got a geometric stress concentration at both of those corners. I've also got a stress concentration because I have a microstructure in here, okay. Never sealed in the HAZ has difficult mechanical properties of the steel and the base material, because of the heat affected zone of the weld. So I have a metallurgical discontinuity which can create a stress concentration. I also, at this point with the geometric, also have a little bit of slight undercutting, or I can have some, as the weld solidifies I can have some sort of microcracks, hot shrinkage, very fine, less than a human hair. But enough that you started binding all these things in the same spot, and all those things will bind. You just doesn't do any good to weld.

p33 33:58

As you can see, if you look at the bed of a tractor trailer or down the road, assuming an aluminum tractor-trailer bed, it's a steel frame tractor-trailer, that's just a big plate of steel. And they make a C-channel out of it. So the steel frame is a ladder frame construction, and you've got a big radius. Okay, so you've got, gotta C-channel, and then you got another one over here. That's the ladder, those are the two ladder rails, and that's what forms back the truck, okay. This is usually a high-strength steel like eighty or ninety thousand inside. You are not allowed to weld on that. It's a National Highway Transportation Safety Authority, you're not allowed to weld. Now, you get some guys that old boy, you know, comes along, he wants to add some little bracket to the bottom of this truck. He puts a little weld down there, and you know, 100,000 miles later, which is not a lot on a truck, okay, and this frame falls apart. All right, you can't weld high-strength steels and get any keys deep. Okay, you can bolt on it, they put these drill holes in, you can bolt things on, but you don't weld on, nothing less is that they connect to their, folsom yeah, they're all kind of people.

p34 35:25

Now in automotive, well, automotive side, the unibody construction, but some of the trucks, some of the pickup trucks, they don't have the stresses of a big eighteen-wheeler, right, and some of those are welded construction, and they have ladder frame construction. Okay, so in two channels for snow tough, you know, oh, you know, he has, what, a red Dodge Ram and Chevy Silverado and something, some of those are welded. But they're welded under very carefully controlled conditions in plant, and they've done all kind of fatigue tests and designed it so that the locations of the welds are not in the most. So I'm not saying you won't ever see a weld on, Ventura, CA aftermarket weld on one of these, okay. On the big frame trucks, I've never seen anything except bolted connections, the eighteen-wheeler trucks. On this race well, I should have, but only the ones offense. Thank you. Remember, okay, but then that's why they call me, okay.

p35 36:35

There are lots of details, welds, but you know about that, you either, then the shipyard or work on the show. And you have lots of different geometries of welds. This is one which I'll show you later. They have a cover plate on something, and you're not allowed to weld around the corner like this. You leave, just weld the two sides, you leave that, the cause of residual stresses. So we're, so there's lots and lots of weld details. This book is just giving you some of them. There are sometimes hard spots. I'll bet you have some of these types of things on board ship, where you've got something is holding something, and you stop the weld right here. That's a hard spot, stress concentrations, that's where the failure. Okay, you got a lot of these on ships.

p36 37:34

So we've got over that. So the lesson is I do about the air max. They have no strategy and silver, so when they are shipped there, those are maybeth are pretty beneficent. Then they have a huge circumference of additional metal built on them, so they arrived with the bumpers. How to do it, and so when you put that in the buffer zone, meets up with the frame people in suits that are welding, they set up welding onto the body of the cylinder. Your welding, oh no, they just remove it as a conference around this, alright. A lot of times, solve this problem, you put a dumper plate, a doubler plate on the shell, and the doubler plate will be welded up radially, and much lower stress because you're spreading down a much larger area, you know, you're not concentrating on one spot. And then you have this exact same detail, but it's sitting in the south, you're basically putting it, you're putting pads in the saddle, right. So there's lots of different details you can do to reduce the stress. But you know, this isn't terrible, okay.

p37 38:40

I had a situation once on cement trucks. They have fifty-gallon, two-hundred-gallon tank of water, and they use the air pressure from the air brakes on truck. The truck has 55 psi air to run the brakes, but it's a big old cement truck, you even with power brakes — well, it is power brakes, was 55 psi air power brakes. In fact, sometimes you're coming down through a hill, and about this country that's somewhat residential, it says air brakes not allowed, because if you ever heard a truck with air brakes, it's pretty noisy, it'll wake someone up today, when we're going. Okay, so you have this 55 psi air. Well, cement trucks, always get people spill cement on wet cement, okay, importance of em. So they have this 200-gallon tank of water they carry on the truck with them, and they have hoses they can pressurize it. They get psi, that's about the pressure of your garden hose at your house, so they take that thing, sprayed off, so they don't get cement caked on there on the truck, right. They also, when they really have a problem, they often carry a couple gallons of muriatic acid, which is HCl, hydrochloric acid. You want to see corrosion if they don't rinse it with the water.

p38 39:57

Anyway, so had tanks like this, and the story was, well, one of them, a guy came back from Iraq, he was working as a welder in Pennsylvania, and they had a leak. And they have a leak because they had some pressure vessel tank, it didn't have any doubler plates. And I'll tell you why in a second, but it was made out of aluminum, and they, these things would leak, and officially you were supposed to send them back to the company, because they want to sell you a new tank, okay. These things were always fatiguing, they're vibrating going down the road, they got two hundred gallons of water in them, so it's big heavy thing, and they will fatigue. But the boiler and pressure vessel code had some flanges, bolted flanges, and you know, things coming out of it, so you can attach things, it would leak at those welds, whether it's a weld like this, sound weld, or whether it's a pipe circumference or nozzle connection good matter. They were leaking in head circumference of welds going around the end caps and whatnot.

p39 41:07

And but no doubler plates. ASME boiler pressure vessel code would require, end caps okay. So you had a nozzle, your nozzle, if this is the wall of your tank, and this is your penetration with a pipe coming through, you have another, you have a doubler plate, going to plane for this thing right here, coming through another plate. You fillet weld over here, we fillet weld over here, you so weld here, you fillet weld here, and you don't have a big sharp concentration right there. Required under the ASME code. Well, ASME code excludes water tanks, okay. So the company out in Iowa was making these things — that are big company, sort of a mom-and-pop shop. They look at the Department of Transportation, which regulates the trucks on the highways, and said, well, how are these design rules that we have to follow when we make these tanks? DOT says, no, that's just an appendage, that's just something you're faring, has nothing to do with the truck going down the highway. You're not using it when it's going down the highway, it's just a water tank that you're going to use to clean off the tank. It's like throwing a water tank the back of your pickup truck. We don't regulate what you put the back of your pickup truck, we only regulate what you try, that sort of makes sense, right.

p40 42:42

And so then they called up the Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania, and said, well, we got this vessel here that we're carrying water. Oh, water vessels are excluded from the boiler pressure vessel code, you don't have to follow a boiler pressure vessel. So the cupcakes are okay, we don't need doubler plates. Now, the guy making this decision was not the engineer. The company didn't have an engineer. They were building these whole trucks, and they would buy the hydraulics from a company who made hydraulics, they would buy their tires from, you know, off, and everything was a bunch of components, and they just assembled them. The guy who made this decision was their attorney, okay. He was looking into the regulations, he had no engineering training. He made the decision, just a simple little design, no doubler plates was all they had to. So this guy's fixing some of the welds, because the fractures, the heavies, all the time. In fact, the attorney for high files wasn't a bad business, but selling replacement tanks.

p41 43:44

And this guy's welding on this, and he goes to check and see if he fixed the leak. And he's supposed to be five psi air, hundred psi here, he blows this tank off. The end cap comes off, blows him fifty yards away up against the concrete wall, he's in four pieces, okay. So he survived three years in Iraq and shot at, but he didn't survive welding in Pennsylvania. So they looked at this later, and they found, well, they had actually had, when they did, that do a pressure test on these tanks before they send them out, because they are pressurized, we were comprised. And it actually had an accident once, okay. And they basically cut guys to leg off, when let go, Hayden get killed than just, but he was in three pieces, okay. And they said, oh, what's, didn't listen to the flute. This attorney decided it was just must be, if they didn't go get a consultant to say why did this occur, but they got to be caged. So that all the pressure tests in the future would be done inside of the cage, in case they had another fluke, okay.

p42 44:53

In fact, when you fill up the tire on big eighteen-wheeler, big tire like that, by OSHA, you must do that inside a cage, and this cage like one-inch steel heavy wall steel bars, because at that tire, that balloon knows, I mean, people get killed when they're standing next to it. But anyway, so turns out, it's just that, it was a mom-and-pop design, they didn't have a clue what they were doing, this attorney didn't have a clue, develop engineering. And it turns out, I only got involved in that, I was working with the guy in California, Roger, who used to be on the main committee, and the boiler and pressure vessel I was there for welding things there, from the pressure vessel regs. And he realized he called Pennsylvania. It turns out technically, in Pennsylvania, it should have, even though it didn't come under the code, the way the attorney to ask the question of the people at the state, they said, oh no, we wouldn't regulate that because it's a water tank. If they actually didn't give a name a better communication of what the question was. It turns out under Pennsylvania law, it should have been required to meet the ASME code, even though ASME code excluded that particular application. It just happens to be a quirk of the Pennsylvania law. So it wasn't illegal tank, okay.

p43 46:13

The real problem was, Roger realized, well, how many of these are there out there? A hundred thousand, okay, going down the cement trucks all over the country. And Roger goes to his friend who's head of the National Board of Pressure Vessel Inspectors and said, we got a hundred thousand bombs out there that could go anytime, we need to get them inspected. And the guy says, we can't do it, we don't have enough pressure vessel inspectors in other states to take on an extra hundred thousand vessels. Just some of the complications that occur in, and when you have lawyers doing the design, okay.

p44 46:58

Why did, why the one of the best kid is, the weld was weakening it. Yeah, it was, long as not a great weld. But the real reason was, the thing is designed for 55 psi, and if you put a hundred psi in it, that's the test pressure that he was supposed to have a regulator on the urethane, it would limit it to five psi, and that tank would have taken five psi, and they would have found it, there were new leaks. But in fact he put a hundred psi, well, no one was really allowed to know exactly, you know, but we think he connected the air pressure, went off to do something else, and just happen to be standing in the wrong spot when it finally did let go. And it was closer to 100 psi were like, oh, okay. But the welds were not so great either, okay. To repair welds were not so good. It's not that easy to a woman, it's not that hard well steel. A guy can learn to weld steel for a reasonable extent in a couple weeks time, in fact probably wearing your shipyard welding programs that goes for two weeks. Well, there are some businesses where you go to school for one day, learn, go, you go to school for one day, learn how, well they're not so good. So I'll do a good job on welding over, if I need six months, okay. It's just a harder material to learn window closed with the oxide and things like that. Do a good job on titanium, while you learn, okay. Shaq, you're the one talking about the rolling pin welders, which other ones, I don't who did the titanium. It is okay, only ten certified welders, and that whole shipyard titanium, and they try to get two more, it take a while. Or titanium is harder than aluminum. It's actually easier to make a good-looking weld, it's hard to get a non-contaminated. Local talk about that.

p45 48:47

You've seen this detail, when you found rat holes or mouse holes, okay. You don't like intersecting welds, and you can have, you have to have sometimes some intersecting welds, but they actually puts a little, the structure of the show, you basically you'd rather have a half circle hole than two intersecting welds, because there's two intersecting with a tremendous residual stresses. It turns out this is out of the, these civil engineers steel construction manual, and there's a chapter on fatigue. And you can look at loading conditions down here, and they have you figure out whether your bridge or your building is going to get something less than 100,000 cycles, less than half million, less than 2 million, or over too many cycles. That's your loading condition, and then you come over to another table over here which goes on for pages and pages. The plain material is considered stress category A, and tension or reverse spending kind of stress built up numbers. They actually put a weld in it, and all the sudden it's down the stress level B, category B. And I'm going to go through all the categories and stuff. This should eventually get out, the stellar I think on the story, but anyway it's in that, it's in the structural welding code AWS D1.1, that red white black ivory, you find a book like this.

p46 50:11

I was just going in a pretty spec yesterday, I swear my fatigue book is, and they have similar types of things. So they got all kinds of different stress categories down to E and F, and you can look up a fatigue curve. I don't think I have the fatigue curves, they'll give you S-N curves for those different categories. But then they, you can go and actually draw you a picture for those of you that can understand what the event is. The stress category A, here's a buildup, here's a built-up number, here's just a simple double butt weld in axial tension, here's a something in bending, fillet weld built-up member, here's that doubler plate, but you don't weld across the front, don't go around the corners, okay, I'll show you why. So there's all kinds of, this is just a few of the pages. You can usually buy in some sort of joint detail that's similar to something that you actually have, okay, in your structure, and it will tell you, and you can have a factor of stress to be welled. And it goes from about, for carbon steel goes from about twenty-one ksi strength fatigue strength down without stuff for a long time. It might go from ten down to three, well, have about a factor of three, and your stress that you can tolerate, depending on the geometry of that structure and where the weld is located.

p47 51:47

So you got to pay attention to design for fatigue. In the last couple minutes I'll show you, this is the King Street Bridge in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia. The, I think the same failed late 1970s, and cars were going across the bridge, and the bridge is kind of a big major bridge across some part of Melbourne. They are going places, going over King Street. Brittle fracture, going out through here. And here's your weld detail, doubler plate, the strength of the bottom flange, probably suffered cover plate here, say, it had a hydrogen crack from welding and grew by fatigue to a critical size, and then bang, okay, knowing I heard. But they were very concerned, they lost a major thoroughfare for about a year, or if I had to go a long way to work because. And so now, since then, you're not allowed to put the weld on going across that division, you got to weld, shrinking in this direction and in this direction, and those corners are tremendous source, or sources what does some kind of hydrogen crack, fatigue. Well, there's certain types of details that are forbidden and therefore good, not because someone sat there and calculated it one day, but someone just decided one day to learn, something failed, and that's one of the codes and standards are developed. It's just experienced, okay, someone, we have a failure, we bought a study why down.

p48 53:29

And we drop effect as, a guy at Duke University, Henry Petrosky, wrote a book. This is civil engineering department, he wrote a book called To Engineer is Human, and I was joking about seven books, he made got famous off this. He was elected member the National Academy of Engineering. We've done to this book is sort of an engineer who goes around talking about how we learn to engineer new structures from failures. So we learned, walk from the sequel problem, expensive lesson to learn, but we learned a lot about welding high-strength steels that we didn't know about. We learn about process control, the Thresher, I mean, the whole SUBSAFE program, okay. We mentioned some savings on bubble kind of use that term, but that came out of the Thresher disaster.

p49 54:21

So I like, down and away, and never on its first under wages. Yeah, first he thought it was, actually he was built up here in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, of course, New Hampshire. And I was living, was mid-sixties or so, I was living in Virginia Beach. And what happened is, they had a surface ship is on his first control deep dive, and they don't, remember all the details. A couple students over the years have chosen the pressure for the presentation, and they don't know exactly what happened, but it is like four or five thousand feet of water or something, made for 4,000 meters, remember. But they had a hard time even recovering parts of it. One theory is, it was a bad braze joint, and one of the seawater piping penetrations through the main pressure hull, and then this is kind of four-inch or six-inch pipe just brazed. Although we can talk about how the Navy in the SUBSAFE program redesigned that. But Rickover was still around, still in charge, and they shut down all summer in construction for about a year and a half to three years. And a lot of the manufacturing manage with techniques that are now used in the 1990s by commercial people, the US Navy developed them under Rickover in the 1960s because of pressure.

p50 55:42

But they think it was a major penetration into the reactor compartment, they lost power. They didn't have the pumps to blow out the tanks, the ballast tanks enough, and they were on a slope supposedly coming up, because I had a tender right above them, okay, that knew what was going on, and they could hear from her mother sonar, these guys screaming to them in the sub. And they were on a slope towards the surface, but they hadn't been able, because they're such a deep dive. Well, they blew the ballast tanks, but they didn't blow enough water out of the ballast tanks, and they went up and they came that count. So I can help a little bit with that.

p51 56:30

Student: So the issue, like said, multiple bridge going, and see what are these your systems, and they did a service should guard ocular back by the root cause. Wasn't a simple, like, so over thirty percent of all of these joints were failing inspection tests, and go to Kyoto, standardized bishops who I see with these this condition well in joints. And if there is a seal-air connected system app that fails, you are sprayed on the breakers that control your, RC surgery, yeah, bed reactor scram. So you have lost a burger thermal battery really. So the ship initiates procedures for coming shallow, which is to put up angle and usage late, momentum-type Anthony up. But they tried to accurate an emergency PLZ blow. And be cut at the time, they didn't have the same kind of air flight controls we have for our enemies ecosystems now. They suspect that there's moisture system to high pressure air before, sue small pipe meeting frozen with moisture inside the pipes, freeze, can actuate the name to blow, says the air, but may mouthing general there. And so yeah, I'm angles, the results of the kind of attention Christina burka, Michelle, but failure to initiate UBT blow. And none of ours, home of their reasoning communicate with the service ship was having none, stand. And then they can lost contact. Based on the dub a user to instruct it, this should essentially kind of slipped back down. It's trying to go up, this motion is no, slips and kind of plummets directly downward, plush test, breaks into two pieces. And that portion really is an abolitionist, and like a pile on the slant or above the ocean right now.

p52 58:11

That's the sort of show, okay. That's more detail than I ever heard before, but well, for a long time some of that was, everything was classified until probably the 1980s, okay. I mean, I was really hush-hush about what happened. The part I, was to protect the Navy from embarrassment, okay. But in fact the welds were enforcement and terrible, it wouldn't surprise me if that's not one of the reasons they eventually shut that shipyard down. We was just terrible quality control. A lot of the quality management systems that are in place throughout the United States and all this stuff with the Japanese and their quality control techniques came out of the SUBSAFE program, okay. Find that was, the names again, Rickover was leading that, and he had her white checks and Congress, and he didn't want to be embarrassed again from the Congress, but it was his tragic. And one of the tragedies is, the people on the tender could appear, maybe the phone, but they think they could hear from soda records, so that they feel a little bit more, selfish people they really heard, was the sounds of theirs artist glass.

p53 59:21

But anyways, I heard it, personally I heard that recording, was actually given most happened to the command of course, and you can actually hear the captain of the pressure narrating for tech department was collapsing. I've not heard anything. Oh, so I mean, been so in a NAPSI ENT annual training in which you watch a video, and they played a report of compartments.