§1. Hardness vs. hardenability: definitions [00:02]
We have to come up with some definitions of different terms that are similar in metallurgy.
Let's do hardness first. I talked about hardness yesterday, used a little indenter. This is the definition out of the ASM materials engineering dictionary: hardness is a measure of the resistance of a material to surface indentation or abrasion, and may be thought of as a function of the stress required. It turns out some of the tests are actually one-third or three times the tensile strength. If you take my deformation processing course you can prove it mathematically that in a non-plastic, non-work-hardening material it should be exactly 2.57 times, but because it work hardens it's about three.
We talk about Brinell, Rockwell, Vickers, Knoop types of hardness tests. So hardness is just a measure of the strength of the material, whatever condition it's in — heat treated or non-heat-treated.
Hardenability, on the other hand, is the relative ability of an iron alloy to form martensite. Martensite is this non-cubic crystal structure that is very hard when quenched from a temperature above the critical temperature. You can get hardnesses above 50 Rockwell C — this metal file is probably 55 or 60 on the ends, okay. Hardenability is a function, as I showed you, of the carbon content and also the alloy content of the material.
Hardening is how you increase the hardness of a material, by various heat treatments: age hardening, which we do with aluminum; flame hardening; induction hardening; precipitation hardening; quench hardening. Steels are quench hardened, as far as that goes. So there's lots of ways metallurgists have to try to change the strength of a material. Hardness is a measure of the strength, whereas hardenability is actually a measure of the depth.
So we look at it like this. Hardness in steels is a function of the carbon content. Low carbon steels, you can't get more than Rockwell C20 or 30, but if you increase the carbon up to about 0.6 percent carbon you can get Rockwell 60, and then the curve bends over. Hardenability, on the other hand, is a function of the carbon content of the steel and the alloy content — other elements: chrome, nickel, molybdenum, and whatnot.
§2. Jominy end-quench and CCT diagrams [03:34]
If I look at just a plain carbon steel — this is a 1021 steel — this is the distance from the quenched end of a bar. They take a cylindrical bar, put a shield around it, and they quench the hot steel just by hitting it with a strong jet of water at one end. Then they measure the hardness into the steel in eighth-of-an-inch units. So you can harden a 1021 steel, which is a low carbon steel, easily weldable — a little bit higher carbon than you make automobile sheet metal out of — but you can only form martensite to about an eighth of an inch, or two-eighths of an inch, a quarter of an inch deep maximum, because the reaction is so fast.
The problem is I want to make something that's strong, like two inches, four inches, six inches thick. So I want to make a plate that's strong and has high strength. The maximum I might get with a 1020 steel was about 40 Rockwell C. I could get 60 Rockwell C if I had a higher carbon — that's hardness. But I can't get much deeper with high hardness. So what do I have to add? An alloy.
We have curves, and there are whole books with these types of curves, which are called continuous cooling transformation diagrams. If I heat a steel up — this would be Fahrenheit, 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, or actually I heat up to about 1600 or 1700 — and I quench it in water. This is time on a log scale. So this is one second; I have to quench that and cool it down within less than a second. This is for 8630 steel. I have to cool it down within less than a second to get 100% martensite. I might not transform all the austenite, which is the phase at high temperatures, but if I want to get my martensite I've got to cool it down in less than a second.
If I add alloying content to this I can push what we call the nose of this curve all the way over. So this is the transformation curve. If I cool at a slow rate like D here from a higher temperature, I'll go through the transformation to ferrite. If I have something in this region I can transform to bainite, which is this sort of region that the old people before the 20th century didn't know about. Edgar Bain discovered bainite when he was doing tests where you quench into liquid lead and hold it at temperature. He was able to come down, transform — and we actually do those types of heat treatments now when money's not an object. It's expensive to do that, but we can do it.
So you can take these steels and you can add alloying content. Here's my rapid quenching to get martensite; here's my quenching part way — it's called austempering, to get bainite. You come down at some intermediate temperature like six or seven hundred degrees, hold it there, and then you cool down the rest of the way. If you cool down slowly through this region you get ferrite, which is a nice soft steel, easily formed.
This is a 1080 steel, so this is something that you have to cool down in less than a second. But if I add some alloy content — this is 5140, which is an alloy steel — I can change the shape of that nose. Now I have about two seconds. You say, big deal. If I go to 1034 steel I can't even beat that nose in a second. If I go to a heavily alloyed steel I can get up to 10 seconds to cool it down.
§3. AISI designations and ASTM specifications [08:43]
Student: What are the whole numbers that keep coming in front of those different types of steels?
These are American Iron and Steel Institute designations. The thousand series are the carbon steels. The four thousand series are basically a nickel-chrome steel. The 5000 series I think is just a chrome steel. The 8000 series is a nickel steel as I remember, but different. It tells you the family of alloy content. The last two numbers — the 34 means it's got 0.34 carbon, the 40 means it's got 0.4 carbon. So the last two numbers are the hundredths of a percent carbon, and the first two numbers basically tell you whether it's alloyed or not. So a 1080 steel is a carbon steel with 0.8 percent carbon. 5140 alloy steel, I'd have to go look it up. There are thousands of steels, but you control the carbon content with the last two numbers. The second number will also tell you where in the series you are — whether you're a high nickel or high chrome or whatever.
HY-80 doesn't have an AISI number. The U.S. Navy developed HY-80, so it has an HY number. It does have an ASTM spec, because the American Society for Testing and Materials is an organization that writes specifications so that buyers and sellers can agree on what variations in thickness are going to be acceptable, what are the limits of acceptability, what variations in composition, and if you have a fight, how do you referee the fight? How do you analyze the steel composition? What do you get for various types of limits?
Some of the specifications have extra things you call out when you order. You may order an A106 steel pipe, which is just a seamless carbon steel pipe — that's ASTM A106. But you can say, okay, if you're going to buy that pipe in a four inch diameter and you're going to put it in some refinery somewhere, the inspection should be a hydro test, where at the mill they pump it up with water to so many thousands of PSI. It might take 6000 PSI to actually reverse it, but you pump it up to 2000 or 2200, whatever is on the purchase order requirements, and that means it passed — it was a proof test. If you're going to put this in a critical service you test every pipe. They might be 40 foot lengths of pipe and then you're going to cut them up, that doesn't really matter.
If you don't want it hydro tested, it has to be stamped on it that it's NHT — not hydro tested. If for some reason you don't want to hydro test, the ASTM spec says you can do other non-destructive tests other than hydro: magnetic particle, eddy current, ultrasonic. They call those electric tests. The specifications for the non-destructive tests say you can't have a defect greater than 12 and a half percent of the wall thickness. Well, is that the nominal wall thickness or the actual wall thickness? Because what you actually buy is going to be a little heavier than the nominal — the nominal is a minimum. You design to the minimum, which is right there in a table in that spec.
So ASTM writes these things up. There's an ASTM spec on HY-80. I actually tried to look it up yesterday, but there's no way to index the ASTM to HY-80, because they would just say it's a nickel-chrome-moly plate steel. Not only the Navy uses HY-80 or HY-100 — but mostly the Navy. HSLA-80 is an outgrowth of ASTM A710 as I remember. ASTM has got tens of thousands of specifications, and you can buy them for 40 bucks apiece, and ASTM makes lots of money. But it is a way for buyer and seller to come to an agreement. If on the purchase order I just say A106 pipe, I know it's seamless, I know what the tolerances are on the thickness, on how round it is, how much ovality it can have. It's a 20-page specification. I just said A106 on the purchase order, and I get that extra 20 pages of the spec. That's how we buy steel or copper or aluminum or plastic, you name it. Okay.
§4. Thickness, the submarine hull, and the titanium sub [14:02]
We have these hardenability curves, and so it's a function of thickness, because the thicker it is the slower it cools when you quench it. If you do a water quench of something that's an eighth of an inch thick, it will cool very quickly. If you put a piece of steel that's two inches thick in water it cools a lot slower — in fact you generate lots of steam. It's a function of the alloy content. So HY-80 is a thicker plate; let's say you're going to use it anywhere from half inch to four inches thick. There's an average thickness in the submarine which I can't tell you because it's classified — because if you knew that, and you knew the diameter of the submarine, you could calculate how deep it could go.
If you go down to Quonset Point when they're building the sections, which are just vertical tubes, they do it indoors. If they have it outdoors they put a big tarp over it. Because the Soviets have satellites that can measure the wall thickness from space. They want to know if it's three inches thick or a quarter of an inch thick of the outer hull, because then they know the diving capability, which is classified. I know but I'm not supposed to know, because I didn't get a security clearance to learn it — but I can't tell you, which you probably already know anyway. Right? Approximately. So it is more than half an inch thick and less than four inches thick, but they do have foundations in there that are four inches thick. That's typically for about a 30-foot-diameter submarine.
Now a smaller submarine — I worked on a titanium submarine which was not classified. The purpose was classified, but Draper Lab was building it, and it was quarter-inch-thick wall, and I think it was four-foot diameter. If you start figuring the strength of titanium and everything else you could figure out how deep that thing could go. Four-foot diameter sub quarter-inch thick goes a lot deeper than a 30-foot sub however thick it is, right.
§5. The cost of alloying elements [16:03]
Now, why don't we use alloying elements all the time? Well, there's some good reasons. First of all, alloying elements cost money. Typical prices of nickel — in dollars per pound that you're going to use in the form of nickel that goes into a steel furnace right now — it's about six dollars and fifty cents a pound. So dollars per ton at one percent concentration is $130. And I think HY-80 is about three and a half percent nickel — whether I was talking HY-80 or HY-100, take your choice. So three and a half times 130, just for the nickel alloy alone — I just added $500 a ton to a product that probably starts out as a plate at about $1000 a ton. That's for nickel.
Chrome actually goes in as an iron-chrome alloy. It's only a buck a pound, and it's $20 a ton, and we've got about one percent. So you add a little bit there. Molybdenum, which is in HY-80 as I remember about a half percent, it's nine dollars a pound, $180 a ton at one percent — about $90 at half percent. You start adding all this up and you double the price of your steel.
Now, it's not that big a deal in the quantities that the Navy buys for submarines. But if I'm General Motors and I'm making an automobile, ten dollars a ton when I'm buying two million tons of steel gets into real money. And so these people want the steel companies to control it very closely.
Alloys cost money, but in addition, as they increase the hardenability, they make it easier — particularly when you're welding — to get a high hardness in the heat-affected zone. Because you're arc welding, you're melting this, you're going to have a heat-affected zone. In general, when we get to hydrogen cracking, you're going to learn that anything above Rockwell C30 gets to be a pain to weld, and you have to do preheating and all kinds of other things that you've seen in shipyards. The thicker it is, the higher the alloy content, the more difficult it is to weld.
§6. America's Cup keel beam: 4340 steel welding procedure [18:58]
I don't think I've told you the story of Professor Ingram — I think it was Jerry Ingram, who I think is retired. This is back when we had a Course 13, which was the ocean engineering program, Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering. He was working on one of the America's Cup yachts. In fact this was the year that two MIT professors in Course 13 were designing the competing yachts for the America's Cup. I had to lock their offices from each other, I guess. This is also I think the year that David Koch — David Koch got a degree from the chemical engineering department, he and his brother inherited Koch, inherited a couple of billion from their father, and they've turned it into a couple of tens of billions, so they've got a fair amount of money.
He wanted to do an America's Cup yacht, and this was like 10 or 12 years ago — actually this might have been 20 years ago, as I think back about it. Professor Ingram was designing the hulls and stuff for the yacht, and he's also a person who gets in early, so he calls me up at 6 a.m. and asks if I can come over because the keel beam — well, they have a keel beam, but coming down from the keel beam you have this thing that sticks down to keep the sailboat from tipping over. It provides the resistance for the sail force. This is the water force in that beam that's being pushed by the wind up here, but you've got to push back with the water here. What do you call that thing? Center board, yeah. I don't know if in this design ship — anyway, it's a keel or a center board. The keel beam is the bottom beam that you build everything from.
This was like four-inch-thick HY-80 and they were bending it. When they were doing the sea trials, it was bending. That wasn't a good thing. So he said, we want to use 4340 steel. So you asked about the four digits — well, nickel-chrome-moly-vanadium. It's got vanadium along with nickel-chrome-moly, and the cost of vanadium is about ten dollars a pound. So that's $200 a ton at one percent, but you only put about a tenth of a percent vanadium. With HY-80, if you have a tenth percent vanadium you're only adding 20 bucks but you can get your strength up from HY-80, which was 80 KSI.
They wanted to know if they could use HY-180. I said forget it. The Navy developed that, it's almost impossible to weld. Even the Navy doesn't use it — they built a couple of little prototypes and decided it's too difficult to weld. But 4340 — they were all excited because you could heat treat it, you get 200 KSI. Yeah, you can get 200 KSI, and you get cracks behind your weld too, how good is that? Anyway, they wanted to make this thing out of 4340 because they had to keep the weight down, they needed the strength, and so we developed a welding procedure for 4340, and that's what they finally ended up using. However, the preheat for 4340 is about 600 degrees Fahrenheit. How'd you like to be the welder next to a four-inch-thick piece of steel that's at 600 degrees Fahrenheit? You actually have to wear reflective clothing, and you have air pumped into your reflective clothing.
§7. Sea Wolf and high-side chemistry [22:53]
In fact, when they redid the Sea Wolf in the early 90s, the problem with the Sea Wolf is they were using HY-100.
Student: Which is what composition?
Same as HY-80, just tempered at a lower temperature to retain a little more strength. But the weld metal was much higher, and it was on the high side — all the alloying elements were kind of high. You have a range for each alloying element; the carbon might be between 0.08 and 0.16. Well, what did they have for the carbon? It was 0.15 — is that the high side? The chrome was supposed to be 0.2 to 0.3, and it was 0.29. Every heat of steel that they made the welding wire out of for the first 18 percent of the vessel was on what we called a high-side chemistry, and it was really more like an HY-130. They should have been doing HY-130 welding procedures, because the weld metal was basically HY-130, and that's why they got cracking. That and some other things which we can talk about later. But that's why you try to keep your alloy content down as low as possible — to save money and to make welding easier.
§8. HSLA steel and the Japan trip [24:18]
One of the problems that we've always had, up through the 1960s anyway, in steels is that you had to heat them up to make plate. You had to heat them up at 2200 degrees Fahrenheit to roll them, so the stuff is sort of yellow-white hot, and it's going through the rolling mill — it doesn't melt the steel rolls because you're going through there quickly, and sometimes they're water cooled too. But the problem is the steel is so massive, it cools down slowly, you get large grain size, and large grain size gives you poor toughness. We talked about toughness yesterday.
In the early 60s, some of the U.S. steel companies — not U.S. Steel, it was actually Inland Steel — started trying to make sheet steel for cars by cooling the hot-rolled steel with basically a water spray. Just like a spray from your garden hose. They put this in the steel mill and they could cool the steel down more quickly, get a finer grain size, and double the strength, and they called that a high-strength low-alloy steel. Started out as sheet metal. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars building facilities to cool this stuff and temper it and everything, and they never could convince the automotive companies to buy it at that time.
And then the Japanese come along and they say, oh, we could make plate like this and we could sell this. The Japanese sort of had a sweetheart deal between their steel companies and their shipyards. They could do the research and provide steel for the shipyards that didn't have to be preheated — saved a fortune in the shipyards. So they started making high-strength low-alloy steel plate, and that was one of the reasons the Navy sent me to Japan in the mid 80s. The Japanese had these HSLA steel facilities where the hot plate, after coming off the rolling mill, would go into this tunnel — it was just a big spray booth of water — and you'd cool it at a very controlled way. You wouldn't quench it to get martensite; you weren't trying to get martensite, you were trying to get very fine grain size. You could get grains that are about 20 times smaller, which makes them about 8000 times volumetrically smaller — you've got a cube, 20 cubed. So with 20 times finer grain size, they could get fantastic toughness. They were low carbon, low alloy, you didn't have to pay all this, but you were paying for it in the processing of having this steam tunnel to quench the stuff.
This was great, that was fantastic, but we didn't have it. The U.S. Navy wanted to learn more about this, they sent me over to the Office of Naval Research for a year, and I visited steel mills and I'd walk by these big steam generators and you'd just see steam pouring out of these things as they're quenching the big plates with water. We came back, and there's something called the Title III program where the government can help a company invest in technology that has some significance to the government. Lukens Steel got $100 million of Title III money, and they put in a high-strength alloy plate line in the 90s, and that's where the HSLA steels that you use come from. It's no longer Lukens, it's been bought out about two or three times because they're all going bankrupt. But the reason we have an HSLA steel plate facility in the United States is because the Navy funded it, because they wanted better weldability — they wanted to be right up there where the Japanese were 20 years before.
So we have to worry about the thickness and the alloy content, and of course if your surface chips, you're talking about 3/8 of an inch rather than inches thick.
§9. The Stout & Doty tables and welding-procedure lookup [28:38]
Let's look at this one first, which is a very busy chart — I'll blow it up in a second, but you have a copy of it. It comes out of a book called Weldability of Steels by Bob Stout, who, when I was at Bethlehem Steel in the 70s, was Dean of Engineering at Lehigh University. One of his compatriots in the 50s was a guy named John Gross. Stout and Gross were two of the people who invented basically HY-80. John Gross ended up leaving Lehigh University in the 50s and eventually became director of research at U.S. Steel research labs.
This is the fourth edition — this is like 1980. Bob Stout's passed away now, but in the back of this there are these tables that go on for about 40 pages that have about 200 different steels. What I gave you is the first page of this. There's an index that goes with it. When someone calls me up — I used to get these calls a couple times a year when I worked with a particular civil engineering company around here — let's say this was the same company that was rebuilding the MGH MTA station. They're rebuilding something that was built in the 1920s, and they say, Tom, we got a piece of steel, we got to weld to it, when we're doing this repair, what's the welding procedure?
Well, I go to Stout and I try to find one of these 200 steels that has — we don't have ASTM specs back in the 1920s for this particular steel, but I tell them I need to know the chemical composition. They get some little drillings out of a piece and send it off to the lab, and they bring me the chemical composition. I say I need to know the thickness. So I need to know the thickness and the alloy content, and I also get the carbon content from the alloy composition. So I have hardness and hardenability on that steel, and I try to match it up to one of these 200 steels that's in Stout and Doty. Stout and Doty's table here gives me the welding procedure. Again, being an expert is sometimes just knowing where to look, right. That's what I said before.
So the first thing is the carbon range — that's your hardness. The next thing is the thickness. This sort of fits together with what I just put up on the board. They may break the thickness range up, because how fast it cools depends on how thick it is — I'm putting the same size weld bead on. Thicker, faster cooling. Then minimum preheat or interpass temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, depending on what type of electrode, whether I'm using low hydrogen or other than low hydrogen, which means high hydrogen.
This particular steel which is ASTM A27, steel castings, is your garden-variety cheapest steel casting you can think of — up to 0.25 carbon, so that's low carbon. These castings come in medium carbon too, so you have to break this up into low carbon and low-medium carbon. Down here you can have some residual alloying elements, and you have to take those into account. You're going to find that if it's nice low carbon and thin, relatively thin, I don't even have to preheat it. That just says I have to be above 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Actually the ASME code says you have to be above 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much better because you get rid of all the moisture. At 10 degrees Fahrenheit I could have frost on there — I'd be burning the frost off as I weld along, but nonetheless, the ASME code says you cannot weld if your plate is less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. But ambient, basically.
§10. Preheat, the Sea Wolf blue jelly suits, and the USS Iowa turret [32:50]
If I come down here with alloy content, even with higher carbon, I gotta have at least 100 degree preheat. If I don't have low hydrogen, and if I'm very thick, it might be 400 degree preheat. When they redid the Sea Wolf they were doing 400 degree preheat. Anybody ever hear about the blue jelly suits? Well, how'd you like to go into an egg crate that's preheated to 400 degrees? You're in an oven. They suited the welders up — they had to roll in there on their backs on these little dollies, like a mechanic's creeper, working underneath the car. They put them in there, but they were suited in these blue jelly suits, and they were pumping cooling fluid through them — putting them in a little air conditioner. They had respirators because they couldn't breathe 400 degree air for very long, it's not good for your lungs. So they're going in with sort of spacesuits and these blue jelly suits, and I think they were allowed 15 minutes at a time. And you want to know why the Sea Wolf repair cost two billion dollars? These are some of the reasons. It was only a $500,000 hull, but I've been told that the final cost to the Navy was two billion dollars because they had some high-side weld chemistry.
So you may have to preheat more if you're other than low hydrogen. Post-weld heat treatment desirable at 1100 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit to get rid of residual stresses. Is peening necessary? Well, as you get thicker, you may have to peen to get rid of residual stresses because it may crack before you finish the weld. Remember that great big thing, the 17-inch weld I brought by? When you get very thick, that thing took two days to weld up with 600 passes. And they were only doing short links. So you may have to stress relieve as you go, which means you go in there and pound it with a hammer every now and then.
I'm pretty sure it was back in the 80s — this may be before any of you were born — the USS Iowa battleship was down in Puerto Rico. Anybody know this story? No. So apparently they had a couple of gay sailors, and one of them had been jilted by the other, so he decides to blow up the turret that his former — I guess we call them partner — is in. He does, and it blows up the turret on the Iowa down in Puerto Rico — set off one of the 16-inch shell bags, or a couple of them. The U.S. Navy didn't know how to repair it.
The Iowa — let's see, which one did they sign the treaty with Japan on? Missouri. That was the newest, that was afloat at the time. The Iowa or the Wisconsin were in the shipyard being built, they hadn't been completed. At the end of World War II they had a couple of battleships that weren't completed. The Iowa or the Wisconsin I think were the last two in service, and they finally took them out of service in the 1990s. The shells and the powder had all been made during World War II. Back in the 1980s, in one of the Israeli conflicts, they actually had a battleship lobbing shells from 15 miles offshore. That was the last time they actually fired 16-inch shells.
Student: Do they still use them?
Oh, did they lob shells? Well, they're big shells and they go for about a 16-mile range. So now you've got a jet that can go for 200 miles away, right? Anyway, it turns out the Navy didn't know how to repair — they had lost the technology of the different type of peening you would have to do to weld something that's 14 inches thick. So they decided just not to repair it. Well, you've got a couple of other turrets there, and how many —