ERW vs Seamless pipes
ERW vs Seamless pipes
(OP)
Hi,
I am involved in a work of laying of pipe line, and the contractor proposes to use ERW pipe instead of the seamless pipe established by the original engineering. I have been consulting the normative references and do not get the limitation to the use of ERW pipe in services such as fuel oil (120PSI) in a submarine lying.
Can anyone recommend me something about it or tell me that I find reference document?.
Thanks in advance for your help...
I am involved in a work of laying of pipe line, and the contractor proposes to use ERW pipe instead of the seamless pipe established by the original engineering. I have been consulting the normative references and do not get the limitation to the use of ERW pipe in services such as fuel oil (120PSI) in a submarine lying.
Can anyone recommend me something about it or tell me that I find reference document?.
Thanks in advance for your help...





RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=5297
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=311338
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=3872
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=98839
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
In terms of corrosion ERW can last longer than seamless pipe roughly 3-4 years longer. Though the price is expensive for ERW. It really depends on the manufacturer if they provide it for long pipe distance.
But generally Seamless pipe is more recommended.
Hopefully it helps.
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
For smaller pipes and plant pipework, seamless is preferred due to ease of cutting and screwing, but for pipelines it doesn't really make any difference, just rotate the seam weld 60 degrees off from the previous one and no one will complain.
My motto: Learn something new every day
Also: There's usually a good reason why everyone does it that way
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
In 20 years we've never seen a single through-wall defect on carbon steel ERW nor have we ever experienced a weld seam failure, so that gives me reasonable comfort that the stuff isn't garbage. That said, I've seen enough examples of carbon steel A53 ERW pipe from China with nasty failures that we currently exclude all ERW from China. Not fair of course, to exclude a whole country's output based on a few mills' failures, but it's not possible for us to pick a mill and use only their output- we have to take what our distributors sell us, so excluding Chinese ERW throws out the good Chinese material with the bad. We don't exclude Chinese stainless ERW.
In our experience, ERW carbon steel or stainless doesn't cut or thread or roll-groove any differently than seamless, so I wouldn't pay the premium for seamless for that reason. Seamless tends to have a much inferior ID surface roughness and looser dimensional tolerances in general, so from a pure fabrication perspective we find ERW easier to deal with.
As to the OP's inquiry, I have no idea- we don't do anything with pipelines. In B31.3 normal fluid service, both materials are permitted, subject to proper design.
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
When Fairfield opened, the game changed. OCTG from that plant was the best in the world and the ERW above 6-inch was superior to any seamless made in the world. The rest of the producers either upped the quality of their product or went out of business. B31.3 still has some residual holdover from the dark days. B31.8 has exorcised those memories.
Today I use RTP below 8-inch, and ERW above 8-inch. It has been 10 years since I had to make a steel-pipe decision on 6-inch and I used ERW for that job (it was a cost and availability thing, not a performance thing).
One observation about ERW--most of the MIC failures I've seen in gathering system have been in situations where the longitudinal weld was on the bottom of the pipe with water standing in a sag. My hypothesis is that the microbe's offal is especially corrosive in the HAZ of the longitudinal weld. I don't know why it doesn't seem worse at girth welds, but it doesn't seem to. On ERW jobs I always carry a sample of failed pipe to the kick off meeting and show the pits in the HAZ and ask everyone to try to keep the longitudinal welds off the bottom of the pipe (especially in field bends).
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. —Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
• first steel pipe in the U.S.
• Introduced welded casing prior to 1913
• Introduced seamless drill pipe prior to 1913
• Introduced seamless casing in 1924
http://www.steel.org/Making%20Steel/~/media/Files/...
Having worked in a Youngstown Sheet & Tube mill, my recollection is a little different than that posed above. I trust that the steel mill history put out by the API is probably more factual than what has been described above:
http://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas-overview/tr...
"Some safety codes and regulatory agencies also assign a longitudinal joint factor to account for weld efficiency. The more common are 0.85 for ER W pipe and 0.60 for CW pipe. Seamless pipe enjoys a joint factor of 1.00. This means that some designers consider ER W pipe as 85 percent as efficient as seamless pipe and CW pipe only 60 percent as efficient for the same application. Therefore, for a given application, ER W pipe would require a heavier wall than seamless pipe, and CW pipe, in turn, would require a heavier wall than ER W pipe."
http://usstubular.com/resources/library/brochures-...
Here is a specification for steel pipe:
http://www.indps.com/pdfs/Specification_for_Steel_...
There is a never-ending debate whether seamless is better than welded. The arguments typically center on structural integrity and corrosion resistance of the weld, severity of the intended service, NDT and inspection requirements and delivery time. In reality, both production methods can provide the necessary quality and service life, corrosion resistance and reliability. Generally welded tubes are less expensive, have narrower tolerances, thinner nominal wall thickness, better concentricity (outer/inner diameter OD/ID), higher internal surface quality and are often chosen since they can be produced in longer lengths with larger diameters. Seamless tubes are needed where heavy wall thickness is combined with small diameters making forming of plate or strip complicated and where the standard specifically specifies seamless.
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
I have never worked in a steel mill. From 1980 to 1989 I worked very closely with Amoco's purchasing department for tubulars, pipe, and steel. From 1983-1985 pipe made in the U.S. was inferior and we paid significant premiums to get it from Europe and Asia. The purchasing guys said that "when Fairfield opened ...", I assumed that that meant a new plant, but it could have been a new furnace, or a renovation of an existing facility. After 1985 we preferentially purchased U.S. steel products and the rejected joint occurrence went to basically zero.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. —Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
As for Fairfield, the oil companies were very disappointed in it, especially since they had funded it. Fairfield chose not to make couplings and couplings are the weak link of every casing string, so it was same old crap for coupling stock.
And I must say any comments on stainless ERW are wrong. The steel must be ferromagnetic for ERW, so austenitics can not be welded with ERW.
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
I've never been involved in deployment of use of Stainless in upstream operations so I don't have any opinions on that subject.
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. —Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
RE: ERW vs Seamless pipes
There have been many more than one failure in the long seam of ERW pipe manufactured before the USX mill was on line and there are other mills making ERW pipe throughout our global economy. There are many ways to produce ERW pipe with poor performance including: steel making (introducing long stringer type nonmetallic inclusions), improper trimming, inadequate force, introduced contaminants, electrical issues, and poor to useless NDE methods and I saw plenty of them during my initial tenure as a metallurgist in an ERW mill in the late 60's and early 70s. And I fully understand that steel making has made great strides during the past 30 years, but not everywhere.