*This conference session requires registration and payment.
Chatter-Free Tube Drawing
Chatter marks are a well-known quality issue phenomenon in the field of tube drawing. To avoid chatter marks, the current best practice is to operate the machine well below its maximum drawing speed, and therefore, it is not utilized optimally. A drawing machine equipped with an acoustic monitoring system can operate at significantly higher drawing speeds without running the risk of chatter. This session will explore how such a system finds early signs of chatter, and how it can be used to preemptively reduce the drawing speed before chatter occurs. In field tests, we have increased the drawing speed by 80 to 120% while reducing the frequency of rejects to less than 1% of the drawn pieces. The presentation will cover all steps from hardware installation, to signal analysis and the benefits of a chatter-prevention system.
Gaetano Andreisek - QASS Technologies
Stainless Steel Welding Consumable Quality Caused a Premature Pipe Failure
A new project that contains hundreds of meters of welds that were made of stainless-steel material will be discussed. The process media was hydrocarbon and was high temperature service. The welds started to crack after a short time of service. The weld cracks were alarming, a high safety risk, and an integrity risk for the pipelines and in operating the plant in general. Weld samples containing multiple cracks from the longitudinal seam were collected after shutting down the plant for failure analysis to identify the damage mechanism. The investigation was conducted in detail, from macro to micro level, using sophisticated equipment like SEM and XRF. This presentation will explain the investigation process and provide the weld failure causes with some recommendations to prevent such failure in other industries.
Ali AlShawaf – SABIC
Improving Manual Welding Quality and Efficiency with Adaptive Cold Wire Feed GTAW
The focus of this presentation is to provide an update concerning technology advancement related to manual pipe and tube arc welding where GTAW is utilized. The advance in adaptive cold wire feedback improves the efficiency of GTAW where filler metal is traditionally added manually. The presentation will feature one or two examples/case studies of a customer who has applied this and the improvement they documented from this advancement in weld quality and process efficiency.
Wesley Doneth - Fronius USA LLC