Polyethylene is one of the most commonly used engineering plastic having very durable and extremely tough nature. An excellent combination of stiffness and environmental stress crack resistance of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) made it the leading polymeric material for gas and water pipelines with many outstanding properties over metal such as higher chemical and corrosion resistance, lower weight, ease of bonding, and low delivery, construction and maintenance costs. Because of this, HDPE pipes have been used effectively to carry potable water, wastewater, chemicals, hazardous wastes, slurries, and compressed gases.<br/>Recently, buried pipeline for secondary cooling system of nuclear power plants required better quality for safety and durability have been extensively studied and HDPE is the strong candidate materials to replace traditional metal pipeline. In this case, welding technology in a plastic pipe is very important because the welding zone is considered as a week point in the physical deformation and durability aspects. Noticeable feature of the welding zone is the various crystal structures along the position of butt fusion weld zone. This is because the crystallization condition such as cooling rate, temperature and pressure differs depending on the locality of the welding zone.<br/>In this study, we tried to investigate the microstructures of welding zone by the use of synchrotron wide and small X-ray scattering with a micro-move sample stage. In the presentation, we will discuss the various microstructures along the weld zone of HDPE pipe and the structure formation mechanism.

Structure analysis of butt fusion weld zone of HDPE pipe by using high-resolution x-ray scattering

251st National Meeting (2016)

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