How much porosity?

Case Study

Porosity in fillet welds with the result of a radiographic inspection

A problem arose at a structural steel fabricators works, where plates used for
fabricating box girders were coated with an iron oxide epoxy primer. Although the
primer was applied by mechanised plant, overlapping passes of the spray gun caused
localised excess coating thickness which on a number of occasions had caused porosity
in fillet welds during procedure testing.
Before the transverse stiffeners were welded into box sections, therefore, the primer
was removed from the corners by grinding. This enabled rutile-flux-cored wires to be
used without further removing the primer - which increased productivity compared with
manual metal arc (MMA) welding.
To meet the production schedule on the last girder, the grinding operation was omitted,
but when this was noticed by a visiting inspector, he asked for all the welds to be
ground out and replaced. To avoid this time-consuming operation the fabricator
persuaded the inspector to accept radiography of the welds in question, and the quality
requirement was agreed to be that laid down in the contract, viz Class Blue No 5 of the
IIW collection of reference radiographs.
The radiographic technique was to direct the beam of X-rays towards each fillet weld in
turn at an angle of 40 to the stiffener. The film cassette was placed on the opposite
side of the T joint.
Difficulties arose in interpreting the radiographs when comparing them with the
specified IIW reference radiographs and agreement could not be reached on the
acceptability of the welds. A TWI welding engineer made the following comments:
1.

The IIW reference radiographs are of butt welds, not fillet welds. Fillet welds on
primed plate tend to have any porosity concentrated in the root region of the weld,
and the pores tend to be elongated in the form of worm holes with their major
axes aligned with the weld throat. IIW reference radiograph Blue No 5 shows
distributed porosity in a butt weld and comparison with aligned porosity would be
virtually impossible.

2.

The IIW reference radiographs were at one time used, quite erroneously, as
acceptance Standards and this caused great difficulties, as in the present case.
The latest edition of the IIW collection states that it is not considered to be an
acceptable Standard for welds. It shows typical weld defects of different degrees
of severity but the sizes, extent and distribution of defects are not numerically
defined, which would be essential for an acceptance Standard.

3.

The fillet welds do not transmit the main loads in the girder, and TWI and others
demonstrated many years ago that any reduction of cross sectional area caused by
porosity in butt or fillet welds has to be well over 5% before there is any reduction
in tensile strength. Work at TWI has also shown that, provided the weld size is
adequate, fatigue failure occurs from the toe of the weld and propagates through
the parent plate, the presence of porosity in the weld having no effect.

The clients inspector accepted that, in the present case, an increase in the weld sizes
from 6mm to 8mm leg length would more that compensate for the root porosity in the
fillet welds. In fact, there was no real need to increase the sizes of the welds and they
were already over designed - not an unusual occurrence!
For information about TWIs capabilities please contact us.

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