ASME Section III, NCA-3800 questions

[QAFitz]

I will be posting this in the NUCLEAR ENGINEERING OTHER TOPICS forum also.

Colleagues, two questions regarding material certification.

REFERENCE: ASME Section III, NCA-3800(2010) requires a certification for material (para. NCA-3860/3961/3962.1)). Paragraph NCA-3855.5 establishes the guidelines for the use of unqualified source material.

Question: When an ASME Certificate Holder (N-Type, QSC etc.) certifies unqualified source material that has been heat treated by the producing mill, what heat treat statement can the Certificate Holder put on their Certification?
NOTE: Heat treat could include annealed, carbide solution treated, quenched and tempered, normalized etc.


REFERENCE: ASME Section III, NCA-3800(2010)
Question: When using unqualified source material, where in the ASME Code is the requirement to have a material specification on the producing mill test report?
NOTE: A material specification would include ASME SAxxx or ASTM Axxx etc as allowed by the Code.

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration.

 

[vpl]

I am not a nuclear code expert and any requests for interpretations should go back to ASME to be official. Additionally, given that this is a free Internet forum, you should carefully consider whether you wish to risk any engineering action based on the advice you get here, no matter how reasonable it seems.

With that caveat, I've responded based on my review of the 2010 Code, Section III, Paragraph NCA-3855.5:

Question: When an ASME Certificate Holder (N-Type, QSC etc.) certifies unqualified source material that has been heat treated by the producing mill, what heat treat statement can the Certificate Holder put on their Certification?

Only the information that the Certificate Holder knows is correct based on performing the tests specified in 3855.5(a)(2).

Question: When using unqualified source material, where in the ASME Code is the requirement to have a material specification on the producing mill test report?

NCA3855.5(a)(3)(c) requires that anyone who wishes to use unqualified material has to specify in their procurement documents that suppliers of unqualified source material establish written procedures for identifying source materials in a manner that provides traceability to the Certified Material Test Report



Patricia Lougheed

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[trottiey]

Your question is worded in a rather formal manner, kind of like a request for interpretation, so I have to agree with vpl's caveat. But I'll still give my thoughts on it.

Regarding your first question, I think your CMTR would state the heat treatment that was certified by the producing mill and attach that certification. NCA-3855.5(a) says "... a Material Organization may accept certification of the requirements of the material specification that must be performed during [...] heat treatment of the material ..." The chemical tests of NCA-3855.5(a)(2) usually won't tell you anything about the condition of the material, and even the tensile tests of NCA-3855.5(a)(3) can be ambiguous. You need to be able to trust the temperature-time charts from the supplier's oven in order to let them do heat treatment, and that means accepting their certification of same. Of course, you still do your own tensile tests and hardness tests to make sure.

Regarding your second question, I don't think there's any such requirement, so long as you are doing tensile tests, etc., on each piece. (Not just testing each heat.) The producing mill could be giving you incomplete material which doesn't yet meet any specification, so what specification number do you use then? However, if you are only doing one set of tests for several pieces of material from the same heat, then the supplier needs to give you a CMTR per NCA-3855.5(a)(3)(a). That CMTR should include a specification number per Appendix P. But even then, if you're in a bind, you could try pointing out to your ANI that this is a nonmandatory appendix. Sort of.

 

[trottiey]

I forgot to mention, you might want to ask the question in the Section III forum on the following site:

http://www.onetb.com/forum.htm

They seem to have some good NCA-3800 expertise over there.