TY - CONF A1 - Becker, Amadeus A1 - Schröpfer, Dirk A1 - Kannengießer, Thomas T1 - Consideration of design influences to provide adequate repair concepts for high-strength steel weld joints in offshore support structures N2 - The sustainable and resource-efficient production of offshore wind turbines requires the use of modern high-strength fine-grained structural steels (Martin and Schroeter, 2005). This applies to wind turbines in terms of increasing turbine sizes as well as to maintenance and installation vessels and equipment (Ummenhofer et al., 2013). Without the demanded high load-bearing capacities and boom lengths, the economic realization of these goals would be inconceivable. During the assembly of high-strength steel structures, unacceptable defects can occasionally be found in the weld area, although the welding process was executed in accordance with the specifications. In most cases, the economical solution would be local thermal gouging of the affected areas and re-welding. Corresponding standards hardly provide any information on adequate repair concepts, and there is no uniform scientific data on which to base such concepts. This applies particularly to the consideration and optimization of welding-induced stresses due to the high shrinkage hindrance of the gouging grooves and degradation of the adjacent microstructures by gouging and re-welding. The result, especially in the case of high-strength steel grades, are frequently recurring imperfections as well as a missing consideration of the additionally induced welding stresses in the design of the structure. In this context, at BAM component-relevant investigations focused on welding residual stress evolution and microstructural degradation during repair of weld joints due to local thermal gouging and re-welding are carried out within the scope of a FOSTA project (P1311, IGF 20162N). In this study, several relevant findings are discussed based on examples of structural engineering focusing on mechanical-technological properties and residual stresses, for instance found by (Schasse, 2017). Also experimental and numerical work as conducted by (Wongpanya, 2008) and weld tests under defined shrinkage restraint in special weld test-setups for research projects, e. g. FOSTA-P922 (Kannengiesser and Schroepfer, 2015) and P1011 (Kannengiesser and Schroepfer, 2017) have shown that an optimization of the welding-induced stresses of high-strength structural steels is specifically achievable by means of adapted heat control concepts (Schroepfer, 2017). The present research involves systematic investigations of influences of shrinkage restraint, the number of repair cycles and heat control during repair welding of the relatively new developed offshore-relevant high-strength steel S500MLO (EN 10225-1). For the quantification of the shrinkage restraint of weld joints, the concept of restraint intensity established by (Satho et al., 1973) was applied analogous to recent research, e. g. (Schwenk et al., 2008). By means of structural mechanics calculations, geometries of self-strained specimens were identified, that represent different defined rigidity conditions of repair welds of real components, cf. Fig. 1. It could be shown that with increasing weld joint restraint intensity significantly higher residual stresses in the weld metal and heat affected zone up to 80 % of the nominal yield strength occur, cf. Fig. 2. In relation to existing results, it has been shown that a safe repair of such welds can only be achieved by means of appropriate repair concepts and heat control taking the high welding stresses and special microstructures of high-strength steels into account. Finally, the aim of this research is to derive recommendations for repair concepts appropriate to the stresses and materials involved providing a basis for standards and guidelines, especially for SMEs, in order to avoid damage and, in most cases, expensive reworking and to improve the full utilization of the potential of high-strength steels. T2 - Wind Energy Science Conference 2021 CY - Online meeting DA - 25.05.2021 KW - High-strength structural steels KW - Welding KW - Repair KW - Residual stresses KW - Restraint PY - 2021 AN - OPUS4-53319 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -