The Imperative of Fire Safe Testing!

DBB - Fire safety solutions according to ISO and API standards

I often hear people saying “Metal seated valves with graphite sealing don’t need to be fire safe tested, as all the components are fire resistant”.
To be honest, starting my career as a valve engineer, I was convinced, that this common understanding is true – until I did fire safe tests on my own for our Monoflange Series, many years ago. Even after this long period of time I remember very well, when we did the pre-tests. I looked very surprised, when the valve seat was leaking during the firing of the valve.

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The most important facts of an own Valve Test Center

DBB - Profit from German engineering, technology, testing, manufactoring and assembly.

When I think back 20 years, I nearly cannot imagine how we were able to provide such high quality valves without the means of testing them in such an extensive way like we do this today.

I remember very well the time, when I started at AS-Schneider as a design engineer. Fire Safe Approvals and Fugitive Emission Testing (TA-Luft) had to be done outside the company on a third party test rig. There was no chance to do a pre-testing and it was always very exciting when the third party like TÜV was witnessing the tests. Well, most of the approvals were passed successfully, but I also remember some Type approvals were we failed at the first stage. The disappointment was great and we lost time with the re-design and the second try.

Today we are very glad to operate our TechCenter with 2 Fire Safe test rigs, a fully automated valve test bench, a climate chamber, etc. Once we started our TechCenter, it was so exciting for us to learn what our valves are able to withstand and where they have their limits.

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“Fire Safe Approved” vs. “Fire Safe by Design”

DBB – Difference between fire safe approved and fire safe by design.

During the last years I recognized, that people sometimes talk about “Fire Safe by Design“. When I was coming across this the first time, I wondered about the meaning of this in detail – Just using metal to metal sealing, graphite sealing or graphite packing?

“Fire safe by Design” is widely used, but to my knowledge there is no common or firm description or rules limiting or qualifying the use of this concept.

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