Study on low temperature and narrow heating bands of post weld heat treatment for girth welds stress reduction of long-distance pipelines

Residual stress affects the service safety of pipelines, but there are few efficient methods to reduce the residual stress, especially for long-distance pipelines with large diameters. In this paper, a Secondary Post Weld Heat Treatment (S-PWHT) stress reduction method with low temperature and two narrow heating bands is proposed, and this method fully considers the failure of the corrosion resistance layer caused by high temperature. The temperature distribution and stress distribution under different S-PWHT parameters are compared to obtain the optimal S-PWHT parameters using finite element numerical simulation. The thermocouples are conducted to verify the temperature, and the coercivity experiment is used to verify the stress distribution. Results show that two heating bands width of 80 mm and a peak temperature of 120 °C are the optimal S-PWHT parameters with the stress reduced by 61 %. Besides, the levels of stress reduction on the inner surface and the HAZ are higher than those on the outer surface and the base metal, respectively. The high-stress zone is transferred from the inner surface to the outer surface, and from the HAZ to the base metal. Furthermore, the stress reduction mechanism of S-PWHT has been revealed through constraint theory. Temperature change is the initial force, and the constraint is the driving force for stress reduction.