Developing Trend of High Strength and Good Toughness Linepipe Steel

고강도-고인성 라인파이프강 개발 동향

Linepipe steels with a low carbon acicular ferrite microstructure have been recently developed to accommodate the current transportation condition of the gas and oil industry, and they are finally applied to West- East pipeline project in China. By adopting acicular microstructure, both better formability and better toughness could be obtained due to low yield ratio and fine grained microstructure. Mechanical properties of pipe are not greatly different from those of base plates or hot coils with a microstructure of acicular ferrite. Merits of introducing higher strength steels are well known, i.e., reducing the gauge of pipe and the material cost, increasing the welding speed and decreasing construction cost because of reducing the construction period. Threfore, gas and oil industry has required higher strength steel than APIX70 grade steel. Under this background, API-X80 steel has been developed and shall be applied to the several projects. In this paper, developing stage of API-X80 steel is also presented and discussed.