Although the term HIC resistant is widely used, the meaning is not sufficiently clear. It is mostly applied to materials having limited crack dimensions in an HIC test according to NACE standard TM0284 or similar. In the first part it is pointed out, that there is a fundamental difference between steels produced as HIC resistant and only HIC tested steels. The former one are intentionally produced to get a stable and
reproducible material behaviour especially HIC resistance, not only in the tested sample but throughout the whole delivered tonnage. This is achieved by applying a specific steelmaking and plate manufacturing
route combined with a specially adapted quality assurance system. For the later one the HIC test could have been performed only as an upgrading test on a part of material which is expected, e.g. based upon
steel analysis, to have satisfactory HIC test results. Even if a locally good HIC test result is obtained by chance, it is not necessarily representative for all parts of the plate and the order. Unalloyed or low alloyed as HIC resistant produced steels, e.g. A5 16 Gr70, up to now are mainly
produced as normalized steels, The second part of the paper describes two other approaches: These are the Q&T (quenched plus tempered), and the TMCP (Thermo-Mechanical Control Process) types. The benefits and limitations are explained. Keywords: HIC, HIC resistance, Pseudo-HIC, testing, manufacturing route, quality assurance, normalizing (N), quenching plus tempering (Q&T), Thermo-Mechanical Control
Process (TMCP), Post Weld Heat Treatment (PWHT)