Application of Charpy Impact Absorbed Energy to the Safety Assessment Based on SINTAP

The European Structural Integrity Assessment Procedure(SINTAP) was applied to the assessment of welded joints of the API 5L X65 pipeline steel with an assumed embedded flaw and surface flaw at the weld toe. At default level (level 0), the assessment point was established by estimating fracture toughness value KIC conservatively from Charpy energy test data. At the same time, the analysis level 1 (basic level)was applied based on the fracture toughness CTOD. Then the two assessment levels were compared. The assessment results show that all assessment points are located within the failure lines of analysis levels 0 and 1. So the welded joint of the pipeline is safe. It can be concluded that the assessment based on Charpy absorbed energy is practicable when other fracture toughness data are not available, or cannot be easily obtained. The results are conservative.