Oil and Gas Industries and equipment and secure testing systems.
The Oil and Gas industries as well as the Refining and Petrochemical plants have been subjected to continuous and strenuous rules and regulations from Governments, Customers, National Standards and End Users. This demand for quality and system performance requires test equipment and test systems to meet or exceed these requirements. Safety has become paramount in the development and use of test systems and equipment. Personnel can no longer be subjected to situations that could cause injury or loss of life.
Safety Audits, Protective Barriers, Test Equipment, Test Systems, High Pressure Pumps and Valves are all subjected to test pressures daily while the part being tested is only pressurized one time. This type of continuous cycles cause fatigue. All parts subjected to test pressures over a long period of time will fatigue. The degree of failure depends on the test pressures and number of cycles. For this reason the stressing process of Autofrettage was developed to prestress the items subjected to pressure in such a way as to create hoop stress high enough to exceed the stresses in the materials used for testing. Finished parts are subjected to the Autofrettage process for the same reason. While the parts being tested only see the test pressure once, in the field it is subjected to operating pressures on a continuous basis.
Failure of production valves, fittings, pipe, tubing, pumps and related equipment used in the daily process of Oil and Gas related products are no longer going unnoticed. When failures occur and the items in question have not been tested or have been tested on less than adequate equipment questions arise as to the safety of the systems and component parts. In addition, leaks in production systems caused by untested or incorrectly tested production parts could cause the product to vent to atmosphere or to the ground. In either case cleanup required by environmental regulations will only add additional costs on top of the loss of product and production.
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