Test & Measurement
When it’s all riding on
Imagine staking your trucking fleet, manufacturing floor robots, or irrigation system on the integrity of the polyethylene (PE) tubes linking their components.
polyethylene tubes EDITED BY MIKE SANTORA
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ow do you know if your PE parts are going to live up to a manufacturer’s specs? After all, every company claims quality. How do you prove it? Milford Center, Ohio-based Advanced Technology Products (ATP) had spent three decades answering this question with a manual testing apparatus that essentially boiled down to a roughly foot-long stretch of tubing, a hand pump, an analog pressure gauge, and someone watching and saying, “That sort of looked like pressure fell off when the tube burst at…500 psi? Eh, call it 510.” ATP wasn’t cutting corners. There simply wasn't a better QC testing option available. ATP had always published a working tube pressure in its catalog, stating either
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a 3:1 or 4:1 safety factor, depending on the specific part. (For example, a PE tube rated for 100 psi would be able to sustain 300 or 400 psi under given conditions.) ATP and their customers grew more concerned about safety test data reliability and began to explore options to better record and capture burst pressure data. ATP became ISO certified in 2023, and ISO standards were also a factor driving this search. If customers had service questions about their tubing, ATP needed a more streamlined, accurate way to investigate issues. In short, the testing tech that sufficed for ATP yesterday would not get the firm to where it needed to go tomorrow. www.designworldonline.com
A new approach ATP reached out to Indianapolis-based Flodraulic USA to help devise a new pressure testing apparatus. The result, as shown in the image below, is a fivestation, safety-sealed, stainless-steel stand with five independent water test cells. Each cell can test one tube. All five can pump either air or water. Four can accommodate up to 1000 psi of water pressure while the fifth, which also includes temperature control, can reach up to 3600 psi. With the station designed, the next challenge became how to control the various pressures and temperatures across the test cells. Flodraulic reached out to Advanced Industrial Products
DESIGN WORLD
6/27/25 12:04 PM