Memo: Internal — Pipeline Safety Interpretation

Page 1September 7, 1993 Furrow/366-2392 INFORMATION: Fillet Welding Procedures Cesar De Leon Director, Regulatory Programs for OPS Richard Sanders, DTI-60 This responds to your speed memo of July 30, 1993, asking whether §§192.225 and 195.214 permit operators to use the same welding procedure for different sizes of fillet welds. These standards require welding to be performed in accordance with procedures that have been qualified by destructive testing to meet certain requirements. Because welding procedures are qualified on the basis of a variety of welding variables, including size of weld, a qualified procedure may be used only for welds characterized by those variables. A procedure must be revised and requalified to account for any change in variables. So a procedure that has been qualified for a particular size of fillet weld could not be used on sizes for which the procedure has not been qualified. However, a single procedure could be qualified for a range of weld sizes, enabling an operator to use the same procedure for different sizes of fillet welds. The size of a fillet weld corresponds generally to the thickness of the material that is being welded to pipe. Thus, we cannot envision pipeline fillet welds that are 10 or 12 inches in size, as mentioned in your memo. If these dimensions referred to the length of fillet welds, since weld length is not a welding procedure variable, changes in weld length would not affect qualification of the welding procedure. dal\192.225\93-09-07#