We introduced ourselves as Sinsina industrial works located in Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia required your technical support for clearing some doubts regarding hardness.
As per Aramco standard mentioned in SAES W-12,13.2, testing shall be conducted in accordance with NACE SP0472 and the following requirements. If hardness testing is specified, all welding processes and consumables, including SMAW and GTAW, shall be tested. The testing guidelines listed in Appendix A of NACE SP0472 shall be mandatory.
- NACE SP0472-2015, General requirements section-1,1.2: It excludes steels with greater than 485 MPa (70,000 psi) minimum specified tensile strength.
Sinsina: As in our case minimum tensile strength as specified for API 5L Grade X60 is 520 MPA, hardness as per above requirements is not applicable, kindly clarify.
- NACE SP0472-2015, Appendix A ,A1.3, The compositional restrictions listed in Table 2 are in addition to the requirements specified by the filler metal specification. A1.3.1 This standard originally specified production hardness testing of all weld deposits. However, experience eventually indicated that hardness values above 200 HBW rarely occurred in weld deposits produced using SMAW,GTAW, and GMAW (spray, pulsed, or globular transfer) welding processes in combination with certain filler metal classifications.
Sinsina: As per SP0472-2015, table-2 , Welding Process/Filler Metal Combinations Exempt from Weld Deposit Hardness Testing(ASME SFA-5.1 or AWS A5.1 E60XX or E70XX None GTAW ASME SFA-5.18 or AWS A5.18 ER70S-2, ER70S-3, or ER70S-4), hence hardness is not applicable, kindly clarify.