This EPRI-ASME-AWS Workshop continues a long-standing effort initiated in 2016 to bring the technical community together and discuss key topics like creep-fatigue, dissimilar metal welds, hydrogen-materials interactions, and others. Invited-only lectures, reviewed by the organizers, and given by a diverse international group of experts will detail the unique and common challenges in the thermal, nuclear, and the petrochemical industries. Over the next three years, critically important themes to the energy industry are expected to include weld failures at PVP 2026, weld repair at PVP 2027, and additive manufacturing at PVP 2028.
Over the course of 1.5-days (morning of Wednesday, July 22, and all day on Thursday, July 23), a single-track Workshop will discuss the research outcomes, service experience, and emerging challenges in three industry-focused sessions specific to the thermal, nuclear, and petrochemical industries. Time will be allowed for questions from the attendees and at the end of each session a devoted discussion session may be coordinated to allow for extended interaction with the audience. The first Workshop in this series will detail well-executed failure investigations observed throughout the energy industry. Approximately 20 lectures will cover recent or historical failures, databases/statistics of systemic issues, the role of root cause analyses to understand the contributing factors to failure, and relevant research or industry actions which support the prevention of failures. The reviewed failures are expected to include examples of time-independent, time-dependent, corrosion-assisted and other examples in boilers, vessels, pipelines, piping systems, and other static systems.
The Workshop will be preceded during the same week of the 2026 ASME PVP Conference by a Symposium on the same subject but the Symposium will follow the ASME PVP paper publication process. The Symposium sessions where these papers will be presented are OAC-06, MF-20, and MF-38. A similar number of papers to those at the Workshop are expected to be presented, totaling approximately 40 presentations on weld failures at the Symposium and Workshop. Information on registration for the Workshop will be provided on the 2026 ASME PVP Conference website.