Pressure cycle testing allows manufacturers to accurately determine a product’s fatigue strength in specific applications and environmental conditions. This enables companies to avoid costly and inconvenient failures and increase customer satisfaction.
Improved Product Reliability
Cyclic pressure testing, also known as pressure pulsation or impulse testing, exposes your products to a series of pulses of varying pressure load over time. This allows you to simulate actual stress conditions in your products and helps ensure they can withstand the rigors of their intended application. According to experts, cyclic pressure testing near me can help you identify product leaks, such as mechanical joints (bolted flanges or threaded connections) and weld defects. It can also help you identify fatigue failure of your products.
Reduced Risk of Product Failures
Many industrial components must endure internal pressure without rupturing, leaking, or experiencing other failures. Cyclic pressure testing helps manufacturers maintain safety standards and improves product performance by identifying potential product weaknesses before delivery. Leaks are commonly caused by mechanical joints such as bolted flanges, threaded connections, or welds. Sometimes, these leaks may be exacerbated by cold test fluids that cause the material to drop below its ductile to brittle transition temperature (DBTT).
Cyclic pressure fatigue testing can help mitigate the risk of early-life failures by evaluating the strength and durability of a vessel’s design against cyclic surges and other varying pressure conditions that may occur in real-world use. For example, cyclic pressure fluctuations in water pipes are often caused by varying household activities and business and industry operations. This can result in periodic water surges through the pipe wall, possibly leading to premature rupture.
Faster Time to Market
Cyclic Pressure Testing offers several advantages over traditional leak testing methods, such as pressure decay and mass flow. Cyclic pressure testing utilizes a tracer gas, which detects low leak rates in relatively short cycles and is unaffected by adiabatic temperature effects. Unlike other methods, which only provide data up to the point of failure, a Cyclic Pressure Testing system can collect and analyze internal compressive residual stresses and volume hysteresis.
This helps the designer better understand and predict their vessel’s fatigue performance. This data can be used to improve the design of a new component or as validation data for existing designs. This translates into a faster time to market for the customer and increased confidence in their product.
Increased Product Safety
A cyclic pressure test exposes your product to fluctuations in the surrounding environment, which helps you predict its performance in real-world conditions. This allows you to optimize the design of your product for its specific applications and environmental conditions.
This test involves filling a component to the desired target pressure, cutting off the air source to isolate the pressure, and measuring the pressure loss over a set period; a pressure decay greater than a predetermined setting indicates a leak. Testing can be performed using water, glycol emulsion, or oil as the test medium.