He can only reject if the minimum absorbed energy was specified in the Contract. If not, its up to your company to either redo the test sample or charge the client for the rework or refuse their rejection and state that the the contract requirements (B31.3) have been met.

Thank you weldstan. I have sent them email stating the clauses in B31.3 that say lateral expansions arw the acceptance criteria and also shows that in other codes the same is mentioned for duplex steel. They already changed the scope of work by changing the impact temperatures from -50 to -60 Celsius now they are rejecting lateral expansions. As far as I am concerned this is not like R&D and they can definitely pay for all further testing.

Thanks for your time

Makes me wonder what they are up to. The last time that I checked the min design temp for these alloys was -40.

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P.E. Metallurgy, consulting work welcomed

Hello Edstainless,

Yes according to ASME MDMT is minus 51 Celsius. I understand that with pressure reduction we can lower this temperature. However once I contacted the top two SMP companies in the city I live in, they both only had 22% duplex PQR qualified as low as minuses 57 Celsius, and no repairs.

I have passes all required testing on first PQR but on the repair PQR (weld cut and re-weld) I can achieve lateral expansion in the HAZ ranging from 0.42 to 0.58mm (B31.3 had min value of 0.38mm as acceptance) but my energy values range from 25 Jules to 30 Jules.

They reject them on the energy values but will not consider the expansions values. All these CVN testing is at minus 60 Celsius minus 76 Fahrenheit.

All other tests including ASTM A923 method C ferrite testing all passed.

This client continues to change the criteria of what they want and don’t seam to understand what they as actually asking for.

I have even suggested changing material type for such templates, to an austenetic stainless or a nickel alloy. But was told to go away.

My only other option is to say that all repairs have to be solution annulled and run a PQR that is solution annieled after welding and see if that reigned the HAZ to achieve CVN at -60 for full thickness repair welds.

I will admit the heat inputs are a tad higher then I would like the welder can only achieve as low as 1.7Kj/min for root and 1Kj/min for hot pass. I am limited as welders are very had to find here now and good welders even harder.
Also if I pay very high money get a good welding that can achieve root pass at around 0.9Kj/min and hot pass of 0.5-0.8Kj/min I then have the problem of all the welders in the shop can not achieve this.

At minus 50 Celsius I have no problems the 10 degrees seams to make a big difference and the client is not budging at the moment.

Thank you all for the help. I am new very new to QA and have been working as a welder for 13 years so you help from this site is Fantastic in pointing me to the right clauses in the codes/ standards to look at.