Stress Testing Pressure Vessels: Oil & Gas Industry

Problem

One of Patti Engineering’s customers in the oil and gas industry had an existing testing system which was used to test large welded structures under hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure. The controls and logging used for this system were old, outdated and had questionable accuracy.

Solution

Patti Engineering provided a turnkey upgrade to give the customer an accurate and modular testing system, allowing them the flexibility to give their customers specific and accurate reports of the test results for each item they ship. Patti Engineering utilized National Instruments LabVIEW software to create a custom and modular testing interface, giving the customer flexibility to create any kind of test and report they might need. We used a Mitsubishi Electric FX PLC for the controls and data acquisition in the project and created the software to interface the PLC with the LabVIEW front end. On the hardware side, we provided two custom data acquisition panels, as well as all cables and sensors required for the project. Patti Engineers spent 3 days onsite installing the system and training the operators.

Results

Our customer was able to quickly create much more detailed, comprehensive and accurate reports on their tests. With a more modular system, future test alterations or additions can be completed without any software programming changes. The test configuration can all be done from the settings page of the LabVIEW software. This saves our customer time and money.