93^rd General Meeting Presentation
Practical Approaches for Successful Production Welding
Paisley Witkowski

The following remarks were delivered at the General Session of the 93rd General Meeting on May 12, 2025. It has been edited for content and phrasing.

INTRODUCTION: Paisley Witkowski is a welding and metallurgical engineer for the International Welding Bureau and Republic Testing Laboratories. She has over a decade of experience in welding and metallurgical engineering within the petroleum industry, encompassing design, new construction, maintenance, and turnarounds. Her areas of expertise include WPS and quality program optimization, turnaround planning, and support for effective and efficient execution of unplanned outage support, fire damage assessments, and failure analysis.

Her slide presentation can be found here.

MS. WITKOWSKI: Today, we're going to talk about the practical approaches for successful production welding. It’s very important. We're going to meet the team, including weld procedures, PQRs (Procedure Qualification Records), and WPQs (Welder Performance Qualifications). We're going to go over some welding processes. We're going to cover the purposes of welds, typical challenges faced in the industry, welding locations, the role of welders – they actually matter, believe it or not – the applications of those welding procedures and PQRs, as well as some practical approaches to these items to date. We’ll also discuss a special topic near and dear to my heart, heat treatment.

So welding, what is it? I'm going to say this verbatim. I'm sure most people have probably heard this definition before. If you haven't, here we are.

A weld: A localized coalescence of metals or nonmetalics produced by either heating the materials to the welding temperature, with or without the application of pressure, or the application of pressure alone and with or without the use of a filler material. Essentially, welding is a rapid heating of materials to their melting point, then a rapid cooling to ambient temperature.

We have weld procedures, PQRs, and WPQs. When discussing welding, I typically like to think of it in terms of a recipe.

Here we have a weld procedure writing guide. A weld procedure specification is a written document providing directions to the person applying the material joining process. Many of these definitions originate from ASME Section IX. Hence, a recipe, how do you do the weld? How do you complete the recipe?

The PQR demonstrates the mechanical properties of the joint using a joining process. The skill of the person performing the job is very important. In essence, it's the taste test. If you talk about, again, the recipes, how do you bake a cake? You have a recipe for it. How do you make a weld? You have a recipe for it.

For all those who like to spend their time on Pinterest or YouTube finding recipes for cakes or sourdough, the PQR is essentially when we sit there and watch Martha Stewart go through the process of producing the cake. We make sure that the cake is edible. We ensure that the weld is reliable.

That brings us to the WPQs. The qualification of the person who will use a joining process is to demonstrate that person's ability to produce a sound joint when using a procedure specification. Can the person complete the weld or bake the cake? We have seen that we have a recipe. It has been proven to work by Martha Stewart or the organization that completed the weld procedure. Can the individual welder or welder operators complete the welds themselves or bake the cake?

I’m sure many of you have seen the definitions of the welding processes, and I'll go through a lot of these quickly. In particular, SMAW, or Shielded Metal Arc Welding, is an arc welding process that utilizes an arc between a coated electrode and the weld pool. This process utilizes the shielding gas from the decomposition of the electrode covering, applied without pressure, and incorporates filler metal from the core of the electrode.

GTAW, TIG welding, or if you’re from the Rustbelt, Heliarc welding. It’s not a very common term anymore, but it’s very fun when people bring it up. It’s an arc welding process, which produces a coalescence of metals by heating them with an arc between a tungsten, which is the nonconsumable electrode, and the workpiece. We're using a shielding gas, which is obtained from the nozzle of the torch.

SAW, Sub Arc Welding, is an arc process that uses arcs between the bare metal of the electrode and the weld pool. The arc is molten metal and is shielded by a blanket of granular flux on workpieces. GMAW, or Gas Metal Arc Welding, again, is a process, surprise, surprise, that uses an arc between the continuous filler metal electrode, typically in a wire situation or electrodes, and the weld pool. The arc is molten metal and is a process that uses shielding from an externally supplied gas without the application of pressure.

And, finally, we have Flux-Core Arc Welding, which is a gas metal-arc welding process that uses an arc between a continuous filler metal electrode, the weld pool, and the process that is used for shielding gas from the flux contained within the tubular electrode, using the addition of an additional shielding gas from externally supplied gas, and without the application of pressure.

Let’s get to the pictures. With stick welding, I'm sure many of you have also heard these definitions. I'm hoping that most of you have seen stick welding. If you have not, it is a very usable welding process. You can stick it anywhere, pun intended. You can move it anywhere; you can run your leads; you can run your grounds, up towers, down pipelines, wherever you go. It is a flexible and widely used welding process worldwide. It’s a little rudimentary, but it’s still pretty awesome.

TIG welding uses a torch and typically a longer-based wire that you have to feed in manually.

Here you see a heat exchanger, a gentleman, a very good friend of mine from Fort McMurray, Alberta. You can sit and maneuver it. Compared to stick welding, TIG welding is a little less manageable in tighter spaces, because you have these long wires. You have a torch that needs to be percolated around. Sub arc is a very nice shorter setup, but there are more sophisticated, larger setups than this.

These are really important, because sub arc can be very challenging to maneuver. You can't take a sub-arc machine to the top of a tower in minus-40-degree weather in Fort McMurray, Alberta, or out in West Texas, working on the pipeline. You can, but there are significant challenges.

This is MIG welding, and here you see me welding. You can see that there's a sizeable torch that needs a connection to an air source. You're still able to move around, but you have some limitations in tight spots. If you're inside a tight heat exchanger, a small vessel with MIG welding and flux-cored, you need a lot of shielding from the outside elements. That can be very beneficial if you're working in a shop. If you're outside, it might be challenging. Is it doable? Yes. However, you have additional requirements for it.

What are the welds intended for? What is the code of construction? Is it known? If not, you should figure that out. If you're welding something, unless you're like my husband who likes to go weld tee posts out in the yard for fun, you should probably know what you're welding to, especially in our industry. Here, you can see an old vessel from the Boiler House in San Antonio that they repurposed to make planters. Did they have any idea that they were going to be used as planters?

Absolutely not. At the time they were probably built to the relevant boiler code.

Those codes can include your ASME Section IX. ASME Section VIII did ones, twos, etc. – B31.1s, power piping, process piping, B31.3. In Canada, we have CSA-W59, Z662. In terms of pipeline, API 1104, AWS D1.1 and many more. Which of those standards and/or recommended practices are going to be utilized? That's very important. When it comes to additional elements beyond code, John Seifert (of EPRI) said it wonderfully in his presentation: The code is the ticket to the game. That is the bare minimum you need to meet to make the mark to enter the game. Do you want to weld something? Do you want to build a pressure vessel? You need to follow the proper requirements.

If your own clients, customers, or others have additional requirements, as many do, you need to follow those as well. That's the next layer. Therefore, in the welding world, you need to look at those additional requirements. Some of these can be found in the API, such as the American Petroleum Institute's 577 and 582, to name a few. Additionally, there are various options for different types of services. In this case, potentially AMPP or NACE, in terms of sour services, and MRO. What are the welds intended for? Are there internal specifications above the code requirements? Are they above the required recommended practices or standards? Typically, these are going to be tighter requirements by the owner/operator/user. It's really important to know those things. What are those services? Services can include sour services, wet sour, hydrogen services, SCCs, such as stress corrosion cracking, high-temperature applications, cryogenics, etc.

What are some of the typical challenges in the industry? I'm sure many of you have dealt with this. Weld procedures are required to be approved before a significant portion of the scope is even known. They want to finalize their weld procedures. We’ve got the PO; we're ready to go. Send over a billion of these weld procedures that meet the bare minimum. We meet the code requirements. We should be good, right? Not necessarily.

You could be setting up your people – your welders and your quality folks – for failure by looking at a base case weld procedure. Less suitable welding processes, just like we talked about. Are you going to try to haul up an entire sub arc system on top of a tower for repair? Probably not. Are you going to sit there and try to force out a MIG weld if you don't have any access or shielding gas, or if you're without any pooches or boardings? Are there preferred consumables without understanding the application?

Again, that's where those services come into play. Additionally, is it a pipe? Is it a plate? Is it a vessel? Do you have the right welder for the job? This may sound silly, and you might think that most people would want to consider this. But this is a very important aspect. Often, you can have an approved weld procedure that's qualified to the code. If you have a qualified welder to Section IX, you should be good, right? Absolutely not.

Again, your procedure may meet all the code requirements, but for that specific job, it doesn't quite cut it. Same with the welder. The welder could be ticketed from one end to the other. They've got all these tickets. They keep them in their pockets. They're really proud of them. And I hope that if any of you are those welders or know any of them, give them a high five, because most people don't do that. Then when you ask them for their service, “Oh, I don't know.”

It's extremely important to have a proud welder. You want someone who can do the job quickly, reliably, and with quality. You need someone very meticulous who will take their time and handle the foreman who says, “Hey, we need this job done.” However, from an engineering standpoint, if a very meticulous welder is required for a very specific repair, it's important to have that individual.

The lack of communication and collaboration is among the biggest issues seen in the industry. You may not know, or people may not understand what they're supposed to be doing. They either blindly sign off on things or fail to bring in the right people.

When dealing with production welding, especially in turnarounds, it can become chaotic. I've been there many times. Turnarounds are one of my favorite things to do. It is like chaos. You have 20 monkeys and they're all going in different ways, and you're trying to get them all together. You're dealing with people operating in silos – especially people completing the job. It's wonderful that we've got all this paperwork. We've got procedures. We've got repairs. We've got plans. We have ITPs, everything. We've got it all lined out, but if people aren't collaborating to complete the job, you'll end up in a world of pain, and it's going to cost a significant amount of money and time.

Let’s discuss experience and skill set. Do you have someone with 30 years of experience, but it's one year repeated over and over again? Do you have someone with minimal experience, but who is willing to learn these things? Do they have a skill set? Are they fantastic on the sub arc, but they can't hold a stinger to save their lives? We've seen it. Don't take the wrong person, welder, or application and try to shove it in a square hole if you've got a round peg.

Where is the welding taking place? Here we've got three locations. I'm a picture taker. The majority of these are either my own or those of one of my colleagues. Here we have a beautiful booth. This is in North Texas, I believe. I found it on a run, of all places. Yes, I go running and find welding labs.

Do you have a test shot that looks fantastic like this? You see it's clean. There isn't much on the floor. They've got welding shields. It's laid out properly – really nice facility. Are you inside a tower? There isn't a lot of space in there, and a significant amount of repairs are needed. How are you going to get up and do that? Do you have the space to get in? Or are you in a nice, laid-out shop, a large, open area, not constricted to a weld booth or any of that, or a vessel or a unit?

So, it’s location, location, location. We hear this in real estate all the time, but it's also important, as you often hear it in welding. Are you welding in the shop? Is it in a ferrous shop? A dirty shop? Is it a nonferrous shop, a white shop or a clean shop? Hopefully, they're all clean, but I've been to several shops and locations that weren’t.

Are there rollers on your equipment, or do you have to go around it and work in a fixed position? Are there bays, and if so, how big are they? These are things many people don’t take into consideration. I’ve judged numerous high school welding competitions. It's wonderful because you will grow your personnel from a very young age. At the high schools where I live, the bays in some of these welding test facilities can be very small or very large. I am a pretty petite woman. My husband is a much larger man, and when we squeeze into those tiny booths to help the students, there's a big difference in how we maneuver ourselves.

Again, the things to consider, especially for your welder test, are: How big are the bays? They're not going to measure every bay but be cognizant of it. Are the booths high or short? Again, welders come in all sizes and shapes, so you need to be cognizant of where you're welding. When I'm welding, I typically need a step stool or a small ladder to get comfortable. I have my stance depending on it. Some people like to stand this way, some like that, some sit, some are stinger welders. What works for me may not work for somebody else.

Here is what to consider when you're production welding as well. What is the setup? I had a job up in Dune Sands, and when the night shift staff arrived, I said, “Hey, I need a scaffolding, set it up for me.” My inspector said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so awesome. Got it, Paisley, we're good.” He's one of my close friends. He's also 6-foot-4. I arrive at the location and stand on the scaffolding, and the workpiece isn’t at the right height for me. I'm like, “Lucas, what were you thinking?” He's like, “Well, you're a lot shorter than I am.” I'm like, “I'm not a munchkin. You're 6-foot-4. I'm not that much shorter.”

Are you welding in the field? What are the weather conditions? Again, many of these plans are designed, built, and conceived by engineers, who can come up with all kinds of ideas in a comfortable cubicle, office, or even in the bathtub. But they're not considering where this is happening. If it's out in the field, are they thinking, “I'm designing it in the springtime, it's going to be a solid 60 degrees?” However, it's being built and installed in a pipeline in West Texas in the middle of August, when the temperature reaches 130. That’s not so fun.

Are you going to the Arctic Circle, where it's freezing cold? I've been on both spectrums. As John Seifert said in his presentations, we can experience extreme cold or extreme heat. The cold can drop to minus-40 or below in many cases. How are you welding in that condition? That can significantly affect your production welding. I've been there. In certain places, you are only allowed to go out for 15 minutes, after which you need to take a break. How are you going to complete a job when your fingers are freezing? And usually it’s a solid 15-minute walk. By the time you've gone over your break, you haven't even warmed your hands up. And you go back and your hands are freezing again. These are all things to consider.

Is it humid? Is it dry? Is it dusty? Is it snowing? Is it raining? Again, how will you complete these welds when you're faced with these conditions? Are you welding internally? Are you working in confined spaces? Does where you're welding care about confined spaces? Is it a cramped space like that fire vessel? You can be very tight, or you can be in a confined space where you can sit and do a little dance if you want to. Do the welders have to wear face masks, full face, half masks underneath their welding shields, or do they have those cool Tony Stark-looking welding machines where it's all set in? Can they move around in it? These things can really restrict your welders from completing successful production welding.

Again, awesome weld procedure, totally compliant, hits all the marks, but can they complete it in production? Is it done externally? Are you on top of a structure? Are you in a location like the one we see up here, potentially up to 350 feet in the air? Again, I've done a job where I had to do a flare stack repair. They pull you up in a man basket and attach you, then say, “OK, tie off here, tie off there, now jump.”

How do the welders feel when they have to get all their gear up there and maneuver around, especially in situations like this? Is there scaffolding in the way? Do you need to access it with cranes or JLGs? Working out of a JLG can be frustrating. Every time you get situated, the wind blows, and you're moving. Do you have to wear your fall arrest? Do you have to tie off? And is it an open area? Typically, in those situations, it can be very challenging to put up boards, which can affect your welding.

Let's talk about the welders. What is the experience and skill set of the welders? We've talked about that prior. You can have welders who have been welding their entire lives. They are golden arms, and then their eyesight begins to fail. My husband is a prime example because he’s out there with cheaters. Again, is their skill set sufficient to complete those items?

And you have this welder saying, “Oh, man, I ate way too much for lunch.” The inspector's over there, saying, “Hurry up, we have to get this thing up and running.” And this one is worried that he doesn't want to bust a job, because he knows his repair rate is tanked, or he has a boat payment to make, or maybe he has to get back home, and he doesn't want to do another repair. These are things that go through the minds of those completing your welds.

How many of those welders are on the job? Are they brother-in-lawing it? Do they get along? Believe it or not, many welders don't get along, which can cause tension. I don't know how many of you have seen black eyes and missing teeth the next day. I have. That will also affect your welds. And what is the vibe of the welders? Are they in a good mood, in a bad mood? Did they get in a fight with their significant other?

Here’s another funny story as well. One of our fantastic welders goes out and bangs at a PQR data log, the whole works, and send it off. Failed. What the heck? You're one of our best welders. What happened? Then, you go back and review the data. If you’ve seen the data loggers, when you go up in particular for stick welding or TIG welding, you'll see a little arc go up, and it'll go flat-lined; they're usually pretty consistent.

I look and it says 10:30 a.m. on the chart, and it's all wackadoodle because 10:00 is when they have first coffee and 10:30 is when they come back from it. But before that, it's nice and consistent, but after first coffee, it's not good. I call him and say, “Hey, what happened after first coffee?”

“Oh, my missus and I got in a big fight.” I said, “Were you mad?” “I was fuming.” I said, “I could tell.” I showed him. “Oh, what is that?” he said. I'm like, “Those are your welds.” He's said, “What happened here?” “I don't know. You got in a fight with your missus. You'd better go fix that. We need this to pass.”

So, what are the vibes of your welders? Are the personnel aware of the scope, and does it make sense?

This is an interesting job. As you can tell, there is a ridiculous amount of writing on this vessel wall. And it got crossed out and rewritten and crossed out and rewritten. How confusing must that be for the people involved? It's not very fun to try to follow. I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and I wrote the repair report.

What about those weld procedures, PQRs, and WPQs? The approach matters. You can go from something very scary and nonapproachable to meaningful applications, including bead sequences, working with your welders for a successful repair. One aspect that is really near and dear to my heart is heat input. How many people have gotten an email or repair report, a plan, some documentation from a wonderful engineer who said, “Oh, just follow this heat input. You'll be fine. No problem.”

I'm looking at them, thinking, “You can pound salt.” What do you mean by “heat input?” Our people don't know heat input. They know what size rod to use, their amperage and voltage, wire feed speed, and how fast they will be welding. Heat input is not a common term that you're going to be able to hand off to most welders. You will have the few and far between that can understand this, but most of the time, you're setting yourself up for failure in production.

Your heat input is very important when we introduce supplementary essential variables, typically when toughness is a factor, or if you're from certain users who prefer toughness. They include it for critical repairs, such as temper bead and controlled deposition welding. Talking about that practically, again, how do you communicate that to the welder? Most go to the rod shack or wherever they're getting their consumables. Sometimes, they have a sheet, and usually, they only have certain sizes on the shelf. You don't have access to everything. You need to determine exactly what we've ordered and what we're using or do a wide spectrum – back calculate your heat input to determine all your consumable sizes. Do you know how many there are? Size affects the heat input. Every different size of consumable will have different directive parameters or suggestive parameters. Every manufacturer of consumables will have slightly different ranges. Are you welding in-position or out-of-position? These need to be taken into account. And how will we achieve the desired heat input? You need to work with the welders in a language that they can understand and reproduce.

Finally, let’s discuss heat treatment. Again, I could go on about various variables in the welding world. I chose these two at the end because they're the biggest pop-ups when it comes to issues and actual production. The preheat is going to be the application of your base metal directly before welding. The preheat makes sense before you start welding because you're in a constant temperature. Those will be maintained while you're welding at the maximum, not the minimum, and your post will have heat treatment, which is after your welding. In some cases, you might need to do solution anneals, which are one of my favorite heat treatments, especially in the field. If anybody ever wants to talk about them, I'm your gal. Solution annealing is a heat treatment that alters the metallurgical structure of a material to change its mechanical or, in some cases, electrical properties. This is really important when it comes to certain materials and repairs.

With heat treatment methods, are you completing it by flame or induction? Or by electric resistance, which is a relatively new concept? As you can tell, those three methods are vastly different. How are you going to be doing those in the fields, in the shop, inside a vessel, outside in the pipeline? Do you have capacity? Do you have the electrical capacity to do that as well, or will you be using a fire burner?

We went over the intentions of the weldments. We went over codes, standards, recommended practices, and services. Where is the welding taking place? Shop, field, internally, externally?

What are your climate conditions, and what welding processes are being used, stick, TIG, sub arc, MIG, flux-core, etc.?

Do we care about the heat input? Is it a requirement? If not, it might be fun to work on, but do you need to do that? Not necessarily. What are your heat treatments, and what methods will be utilized? Again, these things are typically not considered in initial phases but can have major ramifications when you're in the production world. Have you talked to the men and women doing the welding, and have you involved them? The welders are often handed something and told, “Weld this.” A lot of the time, that’s not very helpful. Have a conversation with them. What works best for them in certain circumstances and especially those repairs? It’s important to involve at least a foreman or somebody who's been there, been on the tools, and understands that, other than dreaming up a Walt Disney picture, saying, “I hope it works. It works on paper.”

I'd like to challenge everybody with this. I said Walt Disney on purpose. The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. I challenge everybody to get successful production welding, to start thinking outside the box, and not just the weld procedure, the PQR, and the WPQs.

Thank you.