16.02.2022

What is a Seamless Steel Pipe?

Seamless steel pipes are perforated from whole round steel, and steel pipes without welds on the surface are called seamless steel pipes. According to the production method, seamless steel pipes can be divided into hot-rolled seamless steel pipes, cold-rolled seamless steel pipes, cold-drawn seamless steel pipes, extruded seamless steel pipes, and top pipes. According to the cross-sectional shape, seamless steel pipes are divided into two types: round and special-shaped. Special-shaped pipes include square, oval, triangular, hexagonal, melon seed, star, and finned pipes. The maximum diameter is 900mm and the minimum diameter is 4mm. According to different purposes, there are thick-walled seamless steel pipes and thin-walled seamless steel pipes. Seamless steel pipes are mainly used as petroleum geological drilling pipes, cracking pipes for petrochemical industry, boiler pipes, bearing pipes, and high-precision structural steel pipes for automobiles, tractors, and aviation.


API seamless pipe have a hollow section and are used in large quantities as pipelines for transporting fluids, such as pipelines for transporting oil, natural gas, gas, water and certain solid materials. Compared with solid steel such as round steel, steel pipe is lighter in flexural and torsional strength and is an economical section steel. Widely used in the manufacture of structural parts and mechanical parts, such as oil drill pipes, automobile transmission shafts, bicycle frames, and steel scaffolding used in construction. Steel pipes are used to make ring parts, which can improve material utilization, simplify manufacturing procedures, and save materials and processing. Working hours.


A seamless steel pipe is a circular pipe having a hollow section and no seams around it. The ASTM seamless pipe is made of carbon steel, alloy steel, stainless steel ingot or solid tube blank, and then is made by hot rolling, cold rolling or cold drawing. Seamless pipes are considered superior to welded pipes as they are built using monolithic steel billets, with intrinsic mechanical strength, without seam welds.


What is a seamless steel pipe?

A seamless steel pipe is a circular pipe having a hollow section and no seams around it. The seamless steel pipe is made of carbon steel, alloy steel, stainless steel ingot or solid tube blank, and then is made by hot rolling, cold rolling or cold drawing. Seamless pipes are considered superior to welded pipes as they are built using monolithic steel billets, with intrinsic mechanical strength, without seam welds.


Characteristics of seamless steel pipe

Seamless steel pipe for the use of engineering and construction is very widely, it is a hollow steel strip no seams, it is mainly used to transport liquids pipelines, different look and general steel,one of those heavy type steel, it has a strong resistance to corrosion, resistant to general corrosion.

Will not rust, this performance makes seamless steel tubes extend the life, the most important is that it is very clean and no toxins.

Compared with other plastic seamless steel pipe having strong mechanical resistance, impact regardless of how high a temperature is not interested in the use of seamless steel pipe, it is mounted and the other pipe is the same, can replace other piped water and other liquids.


Since the industrial applications have become complex and evolved a lot, the piping products are also changing to stay in the race. Although there are many pipe processing techniques, the industry's most influential controversy between electrical resistance welded and spiral steel pipe.


As they are produced, some seamless pipe types harden, so heat treatment after production is not needed. Others need thermal therapy. Consult the seamless pipe form specification you are considering to learn if heat treatment would be needed.

As alternatives today, ERW and seamless steel piping remain primarily due to historical beliefs.


Generally, since a weld seam was used, the welded pipe was deemed inherently weaker. This supposed design weakness was absent from the seamless pipe and was deemed safer. Although it is true that welded pipe has a seam that makes it technically weaker, manufacturing processes and quality assurance regimes have all advanced to the degree that when its tolerances are not exceeded, welded pipe can work as expected. While the obvious benefit is apparent, a criticism of seamless piping is that, compared to the more reliable thickness of steel sheets intended for welding, the rolling and stretching process creates an inconsistent wall thickness.


These perceptions are still expressed by the industry standards that regulate the production and specification of ERW and seamless steel pipes. For example, for many high-pressure, high-temperature applications in the oil & gas, power generation and pharmaceutical industries, seamless piping is needed. Welded piping (which is typically cheaper to manufacture and is more commonly available) is defined in all industries as long as the parameters noted in the relevant specification do not exceed the temperature, pressure and other service variables.


There's no difference in efficiency between ERW and pile pipe in structural applications. Although the two can be interchangeably defined, since cheaper welded pipe works just as well, it does not make sense to specify for seamless.


Healthy welded and seamless steel pipe buying procedure

As piping products are listed for a project, an important note to be made is that the specification books (such as those supplied by ASTM, ASME, ANSI and API, among others) that engineers use to direct the specifications they write only list pipe grades exclusive of referencing whether they are generated through ERW or seamless pipe production. By both ways, not all grades can be made.


For example, if an engineer defines welded pipes with a wide outside diameter and wall thickness without understanding that it would be difficult to produce them, a potential mix-up could occur. Until a purchase order is placed, this mistake would possibly go unnoticed, at which point an industrial pipe supplier would tell the customer that the order could not be fulfilled as written. See us at International Pipe Suppliers for the supply.


The development of numerical simulations is potentially useful in predicting the most suitable manufacturing processes and ultimately improving product quality. Seamless pipes are manufactured by a rotary piercing process in which round billets (workpiece) are fed between two rolls and pierced by a stationary plug. During this process, the material undergoes severe deformation which renders it impractical to be modelled and analysed with conventional finite element methods. In this paper, three-dimensional numerical simulations of the piercing process are performed with an arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) formulation in LS-DYNA software. Details about the material model as well as the elements’ formulations are elaborated here, and mesh sensitivity analysis was performed. The results of the numerical simulations are in good agreement with experimental data found in the literature and the validity of the analysis method is confirmed. The effects of varying workpiece velocity, process temperature, and wall thickness on the maximum stress levels of the product material/pipes are investigated by performing simulations of sixty scenarios. Three-dimensional surface plots are generated which can be utilized to predict the maximum stress value at any given combination of the three parameters.


Metal pipes are categorized into welded pipes and seamless pipes. Welded pipes are commonly manufactured by bending and welding metal sheets, while seamless pipes are produced using the rotary piercing process. It is well recognized that seamless pipe provides more benefits than welded pipe, such as (1) increased pressure ratings; (2) uniformity of geometry, material properties, and matter; and (3) structural strength and fatigue capacities under load. Offshore industry especially requires over 30–40 years of design life and robust design of the piping system, pipeline, and riser structures are requested by adopting reliable materials, manufacturing processes, installation, and operation. Many benefits of seamless pipe, i.e., uniformity of shape and fatigue and strength capacity, allow for higher safety during the operation period of offshore pipeline [1,2,3] and riser structures [4,5,6] from repeated environmental loadings [7,8].

In the rotary piercing process, a heated round billet is fed into a plug by the action of two skewed rolls which rotate in the same direction. The rolls are tilted and placed on opposite sides of the workpiece, providing both rotation and translation to the workpiece. As mentioned by Komori [9], the rolls can be barrel-shaped or cone-shaped. Since the invention of the piercing process over a century ago, numerous empirical and analytical studies have been conducted and one of the good reviews have been conducted by Komori and Mizuno [10]. Experimental studies on cone-shaped-type rotary piercing using lead and wax were performed and a comparison was drawn between two-roll and three-roll cone systems. It was shown that the three-roll cone systems are superior to that of two-roll systems by Khudeyer et al. [11]. The effects of varying the feed angle on the shear strain were studied experimentally using hot steel. Hayashi and Yamakawa [12] found that with larger cross angles, the decrease in the circumferential shear strain is more significant. Moon et al. [13] and Sutcliffe and Rayner [14] conducted experimental work on the rolling process using modelling clay (Plasticine) due to the similarities of its stress–strain behaviour with that of metals and because of its malleability and low cost.

Finite element analysis (FEA) of metal forming processes was further performed to gather the necessary information to design and control these processes properly. In addition, the number of experimental trials can be minimized through the exploitation of FEA, which would significantly reduce the product development lead time. Moreover, with the decrease of experimental work, the overall development cost of the product would be reduced. Nowadays, the advancement of powerful computer technology enables the numerical simulations to consider various physical phenomena during metal processing which include deformation, heat transfer, phase transformation, and ductile fracture [15,16,17].

A two-dimensional rigid-plastic finite element simulation of rotary piercing was performed by Mori et al. [18]. However, the accuracy of the results was low since generalized plane strain was assumed from the simulation. Three-dimensional rigid-plastic finite element analysis was performed by Komori [9]. The number of the elements was limited, and the mesh was relatively coarse because large amounts of computational time were required. Berazategui et al. [19] used the pseudo-concentrations technique to conduct three-dimensional rigid-viscoplastic finite element simulations and a new algorithm was proposed to describe the contact boundary conditions between the tools and the blank. The algorithm was validated with industrial tests of the barrel-type rotary piercing process. However, the numerical analysis of the process was found to be complicated and the computational cost was rather large. Thus, an alternative simplified method was highly required [10]. Shim et al. [20] used a rigid-thermo-viscoplastic finite element method and conducted simulations with AFDEX 3D software to predict the final shape in better detail. Intelligent re-meshing and tetrahedral elements were used which resulted in increased computational cost. The same method was then used to conduct numerical studies on the Mannesmann effect in the piercing process, as well as to compare between the Diescher’s guiding disk and Stiefel’s guiding shoe [21,22].

Lee et al. [23] presented a novel method for adaptive tetrahedral element generation for precision simulation of moving boundary problems such as bulk metal forming. The effects of using tetrahedral solid elements were investigated in a three-dimensional simulation of the forging process with an AFDEX 3D forging simulator. The predictions of both tetrahedral and standard hexahedral elements were in good agreement with experimental data provided that the remeshing technique is employed by Lee et al. [24]. Pater and Kazanacki [25] used Simufact Forming software to analyze the effects of the plug diameter, plug advance, and feed angle on the piercing process. The influence of different plug shapes was further investigated by Skripalenko et al. [26]. ProCAST and QForm commercial software were used for the numerical simulation of piercing aluminium alloy. Jung et al. [27] conducted 3D numerical simulations on the elongation rolling process to study how the rolling speed (rpm) and distance of guide shoes influenced the outer diameter and thickness of the pipe. MSC-SuperForm software was used and an automatic re-meshing method of hexagonal elements was implemented. Xiong et al. [28] used the reproducing kernel particle method for the steady and non-steady analysis of bulk-forming processes and validated the numerical predictions with experimental measurements. Topa and Shah [29] performed 3D numerical simulations for a forging process with a complex tool geometry using the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The results were in fair agreement with experimental data, but the method had a poor visual representation of the final geometry. Hah and Youn [30] presented an effective Eulerian approach for bulk metal forming based on representing boundaries as non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) and the effectiveness of the proposed approach was demonstrated by comparing with other numerical methods. However, this approach had the drawback of a blurred boundary condition imposition.


The tools are assumed to be rigid parts as their deformation is insignificant and out of the scope in the current study. They are modelled with shell elements to minimize computational cost. Material model 24 (Piecewise Linear Plasticity) was used to model the Plasticine material behaviour. In this model, the stress–strain curve of the material can be imported to the keyword file to define the relationship between stress and strain. Multiple curves at different strain rates can be used to take into consideration the strain rates’ effects via the stress yield scaling method. Large deformation will cause an increase in the temperature and thermal softening. However, due to the high velocity of the process, it was assumed that changes to temperature were minimal and there was insufficient time for heat transfer to occur between the workpiece and the tools. Thus, the process is simplified to an isothermal system.

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