Piping Systems: Keeping the Loop Closed

Piping is the circulatory system for manufacturing plants, delivering water, steam, compressed air, lubricants and other essential fluids where they're needed. Piping has a direct effect on sustainability. Today's piping systems pose challenges that can't be met with conventional sealing methods.

Most industrial piping systems have numerous flanged joints, each one of which can fail, disrupting plant operations and incurring damage, downtime, lost production and, in some cases, injury and even death. Flanged joints typically fail as a result of insufficient gasket loading. Different types of gaskets seal best at different loads. For example, rubber gaskets seal at loads as low as 100 psi, whereas spiral-wound and metal-jacketed gaskets might require a minimum load of 5,000 psi to seal effectively.

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