Pressures - An Engineering Newsletter
Designed With You in Mind
In today's competitive business environment, we all feel the pressure of short-term demands of our jobs and the longer-term requirements of improving and evolving our business. At Swagelok Kansas City | Little Rock | Omaha | Quad Cities, we are no different.
Luckily for us, Swagelok has more than 70 years of expertise in manufacturing and designing instrumentation components and systems – so we are well versed in all manners of pressure. We've spent years walking alongside our clients, demonstrating our value, and solving problems that clients brought to us or that we identified as benefits to our clients.
Our engineering newsletter is a way for our organization to share our learnings and knowledge with a broader group of stakeholders. Inside these articles, you'll find articles aimed at helping you explore pressures you face every day. We want this to be a useful tool, so if you have questions or topics you'd like to see addressed in the future editions, we'd love to hear from you.
Proper Hose Selection: Things to Consider When Choosing a Hose for Your Application
On the surface, hoses look and seem simple. They tend to be overlooked, often not a focal point amidst other engineered components for a given application.
Process Analyzers: Improving Overall Reliability
Modern-day analyzers are sophisticated and refined instruments, but they still have a stigma of poor reliability. While the quality of the analyzers has most definitely improved, there still exists some doubt about the overall reliability of sampling systems.
Advanced Valve Porting: Simplify Your System Layout with Optimal Valve Selection
This article discusses options available when evaluating instrumentation ball valves and covers examples where a system layout can be simplified to fewer valves and/or fittings by careful product selection.
Custom Solutions: Let Us Been Your Technical Partners
Swagelok Kansas City’s Custom Solution (CS) department has a team of engineers, CAD designers, and skilled technicians who are available to help you develop a safe and reliable system to meet your requirements.
Tools You Can Use
Use these tools to help select and optimize Swagelok products for your application.
Zero Clearance Tube Fittings: Make Working in a Space Restricted Area Easier
When installing equipment and making tube runs, the traditional Swagelok Tube Fitting requires axial clearance to pull the tubing out of the fitting.
Addressing Vibration with Coiled Tubing: Adding Flexibility to Your Fluid System
A common challenge facing engineering, operations and maintenance groups that work with rotating equipment is dealing with heavy vibration. In most cases, the vibration can be attenuated through proper design of an equipment base and adequate support of piping and tubing.
Differential Instrumentation Impulse Lines
Swagelok products are commonly used to hook up differential pressure transmitters to measure flow, level and pressure. Here are some simple guidelines to ensure your installation will provide accurate measurements.
Enriched Oxygen Systems: Three Operation Best Practices
Even though oxygen is abundant in our atmosphere (21%), once we concentrate it above 23.5% it becomes a dangerous system media. Oxygen systems are dangerous not because oxygen itself is flammable, but rather because it increases flammability of most materials around it.
Finding the Proper Needle Valve
Needle valves are specified and categorized for several reasons. Some of the most common include shut off, isolation, flow control, and dampening of pressure spikes. Users oftentimes only look at the pressure, temperature and size of a valve when making their selection.
Focusing on Steam Systems: Your Options, Solutions and Goals
Steam systems can be an afterthought in most processing plants. When addressing the concerns of steam leaks from the Steam Supply or Condensate Return Manifold, a frequent response is, “No worries! We’ll make more!”
From Tap to Transmitter: Enclosure Recommendations for Three Instruments
Ensure you're selecting the correct enclosure size for your systems application.
Gas Chromatograph Installation: Understanding the Sample System Design Basis
Say for instance an EPC is contracted for a refinery upgrade for a new hydrotreater, which includes the installation of a brand new gas chromatograph (GC) in the upstream crude unit, designed for simulated distillation set up to measure end point temperature.
Handling Sour Samples: The Journey Towards Zero-Exposure
One of the recent trends we have observed with rising emphasis is attention to and reduction of H2S personnel protection monitor hits at refineries and other facilities processing H2S laden "sour" media.
Minimizing System Errors: Ensure Fluid System Performance with Proper Check Valve Selection
Check valves are seemingly one of the easiest valves to specify and use. Before we delve into the troubleshooting of check valves, let’s take a moment to review check valve terminology.
Increasing Fluid System Clarity and Communication: Customizable Graphic Wraps Promote Safety and Increased Understanding
Communication in the workplace is essential. It can often mean the difference between success or failure of a business unit or project if not done effectively.
Making the Switch: Save Both Time and Money Going From Pipe to Tube
There is usually more than one way to do anything, and that includes moving fluid from Point A to Point B. Piping will do it, but so will tubing – and tubing is often lighter, simpler to use and eliminates costly, problematic leak points.
PTFE Tape Thread Sealant: Properly Seal Your Systems Threaded Connections
PTFE Tape, often called Teflon® Tape is the default standard for sealing threaded NPT joints. The sealing tape comes in various weights and colors and can cause some confusion among users desiring to be certain they are using the correct grade for their application.
Reducing Fugitive Emissions: A Closer Look at Method 21
The Clean Air Act Amendment, Title III, Air Toxics/Hazardous Air Pollutant, established rules governing equipment leaks to reduce fugitive emissions of volatile hazardous air pollutants (VHAP).Fugitive emissions are small leaks of process fluids through the sealing mechanism separating the process fluid from the atmosphere.
Regulating Pressure Droop: Maintaining Constant Pressure in Your Fluid System
A regulator’s main purpose is to maintain a constant pressure on one side of the regulator even if the pressure on the other side of the regulator fluctuates.
Removing the Irritation from Ammonia Sampling Systems: In-Situ Water Analysis for Anhydrous Ammonia
Ammonia is quite a worthy compound in our universe. Wonderfully productive as a delivery vehicle of fertilizer nitrogen, one of the most important nutrients for plant life, this to feed the world. Thank you, ammonia.
Tube Surface Finishing and Cleaning: Things to Consider When Selecting Tubing for Your Application
We generally work in a world where there is a specification or governing body somewhere that oversees most aspects of our day-to-day work.
Utilizing CAD Services to Ensure Proper System Design
Often times, however, the physical fit of the hose can be overlooked with regard to the published minimum bend radius, a general lack of support or poor mounting orientation of the end connections.
Variable Area Flowmeters: A Simple, Reliable, and Cost-Effective Way to Measure Fluid Flow
A variable area flowmeter (VAF) is a flow measurement device that operates on the principle of allowing fluid flow to pass around a float housed in a tapered tube.