(6/10/05) Newly exploded Luxfer

[ussmeg]

Someone's not doing a hydro correctly. The volume of water that brings a cylinder up to TP is miniscule. As soon as a crack forms, the pressure drops to zero. From outside the surrounding water jacket you wouldn't even know it failed except all the test equipment's pressure suddenly drops to zero.

Roak

Roak I agree, as a tester myself It shouldn't have been any big deal. But as we all know people try to cheat the system. On the station I have is a LARGE burst disk, and As I was just inspected, the inspector told me of people replacing the dist with stronger materials, which may be the reason this Pot didn't like the failure. I hope later we can get pic's of the pot/damage? And some please ask them if the pot was correctly set up? (burst disk)
Paul

 

[The Horn]

They must have been using air, or the tank was only partly filled with water. As stated earlier the pressure will drop to zero as soon as a crack develops. We use a high pressure water pump, no air involved, to hydro large capacity air recievers etc we have on our ship. something strange about a hydro test explosion.

I hav heard of a big explosion in Tobermoray Canada when the LDS cascade system went boom, not much left.

 

[DennisW]

I agree, the hydro was not done correctly.

 

[pt40fathoms]

This is just a wild guess, but it's the only way I can see a tank failing a hydro cause damage as described.

*Haskel pump down for service.
*Shop doing hydro tests does not want to stop business due to pump being down, decides to do tests with air.
*Shop justifies use of air with rational of "hey, whens the last time we had a failure, and it's only till the pump gets fixed".
*Murphy's law prevails and a tank fails, the rest is history.


Now I may be way off base here with this scenario, but if the hydro was being done correctly, it's failure should have been a non-event.

Still the tank failed and it's a good thing it did so where no one was hurt.

 

[BLT]

My question (other than the issue with water being incompressible as has already been mentioned) is how do you get an orange rusty streak in aluminum? Aluminum oxide or aluminum "rust" is usually a whitish powdery substance isn't it?