I work as a package engineer in the oil & gas industry and any metal we use must have a material certificate and also a CoC/DoC (Certificate/Declaration of Conformity) issued by the manufacturer. These are all then catalogued in the MDR(Manufacturer's Data Record) that we must supply the contractor. The last MDR I assembled (for a relatively small project) ran at 1500 pages, a good percentage of which was certificates.
This requirement is not just for the raw materials we use for construction (usually 316) but also all instrument tubing, pipework, valves, instrumentation and electrical(Pressure/Level/Temperature gauges/transmitters, solenoid valves, junction boxes etc. etc) must also be accompanied by material certificates along with a dozen other certificates and DoC's (for Ingress protection, ATEX/IECEx hazardous area certification for explosive atmospheres, pressure testing etc ) issued by their respective manufacturers.
Typical materials are 316, 6Mo, Al Bronze, CF8M, Super Duplex, Monel, Inconel, Titanium... of which Al Bronze and 316(and CF8M) are usually the minimum spec.
Any material we don't have a certificate for must be PMI tested(Positive Material Identification, usually done with a very cool handheld X-Ray Fluorescence analyzer) and certified by a 3rd party(usually also approved by a NoBo(Notifying Body) like DNV or LLoyds etc.)
My point to all this, is that we recently had a bunch of valves of far eastern origin tested. These valves were supplied with material certificates but our client wanted them tested again. The valves were ALBC3 (Ali Bronze) and CF8M (Cast 316) and while all were within limits, some were very very close to being out of spec. The variation was alarming in such a small batch of valves. Consistency just wasn't there.
Also worth noting, we recently started a couple of projects for Chinese contractors and there is an interesting requirement in their own project specifications that basically says that no material of Chinese origin shall be used on the package.
Interesting?
We though so! Hahaha
