Experimental Research on Fatigue Properties of X80 Pipeline Steel for Synthetic Natural Gas Transmission

In recent years, many synthetic natural gas demonstration projects have been put into operation all over the world, and hydrogen is usually contained in synthetic natural gas. X80 is the most commonly used high-grade pipeline steel in the construction of natural gas pipelines. The compatibility between high-grade pipeline steel and hydrogen directly affects safety and reliability of long-distance pipelines. Therefore, in order to study the effect of hydrogen content on fatigue properties of high-grade pipeline steel, fatigue specimens were taken from base metal, spiral welds, and girth weld of submerged arc spiral welded pipes, respectively. Specifically, the total pressure was 12 MPa and hydrogen content was from 0 to 5vol%. Experimental results indicate that the hydrogen significantly increases the fatigue crack growth rate for both base metal, spiral weld, and heat-affected zone of X80 pipeline steel for about ten times compared with reference environment nitrogen, hydrogen would greatly reduce the fatigue life of the X80 pipeline steel, and the fatigue lifetime would decrease with the increase in hydrogen volume fraction. In order to ensure the safe operation of SNG pipeline, the hydrogen content should be controlled as low as possible.