Flanges Used in Industrial Fields

The tightness tests should be carried out if the flanges are going to be installed and used in summer. Flanges play very important roles in the industrial fields and they are often applied to sealed containers. The vessel flange is also called the girth flange, which are the flanges connected to the equipment itself. The pressure vessel flange is a type of vessel flange with the pressure-bearing property. Generally, the leakage of many containers is related to the flange connection. The sealing failure of the flange connection may cause the waste of energy as well as raw materials, and even lead to the breaking down of the equipment, the shutdown of production, casualties and serious environmental pollution problem.

Usually, the flange is used with the supporting gasket which is a ring made of the material with plastic deformation and certain strength. The gasket plays an important role in the sealing performance of the flange connection, and the flanges and the bolts are set based on the premise of ensuring the best performance of the gasket. Thus, when it comes to the problem of the flange connections' sealing performance, the gasket is supposed to be thought of firstly. Most of the gaskets are cut from the non-metallic plates or produced by the professional factory according to the required size. The main material for gaskets are the asbestos rubber sheet, the asbestos board, the PTFE plate, the polyethylene plate, etc. There are some metal gaskets produced by warping the non-metallic materials such as the asbestos with the thin metal plate, for example, the stainless steel plate. The wound gasket is produced by winding the asbestos tape with the thin steel band. The most commonly used gasket is the  metal spiral wound gasket which is wound by the stainless steel and graphite, and the spiral wound tape can also be the asbestos tape. The ordinary rubber gasket can be used when the temperature is below 120℃; the asbestos rubber gasket is suitable for water vapor when its temperature is below 450℃, for oil when the temperature below 350℃ and for the conditions when the pressure is smaller than 5MPa.

Therefore, it is of great significance that the flanges used in the industrial fields should be checked regularly. There are a variety of reasons responsible for the leakage of flanges, which makes the appropriate checking of flanges necessary.