Pressure testing pipelines with ULG or Diesel 1

[321sol]

Hello,
I have to pressure test some underground steel pipelines using the fluid they carry, i.e. diesel or gasoline. A previous test showed that the pressure dropped about 1.5 bars from 12 midday to 9AM the next morning. I need to determine whether that pressure drop is due to the thermal of the fuel and any air pockets or due to a hole.

Tests prior to the one mentioned above recorded high pressure drops in shorter periods of time. There is a possibility air was present in the line during those tests. No measurement of temperature was done but variations can be to as much as 5 deg. Celsius.

I need a standard test procedure to redo this pressure test. Is there any blank flange commercially available with possibly a thermocouple or an RTD to measure the temperature of the fuel inside the line?

 

[zdas04]

A 30 ft section? Forget everything I said. You can test this with a hand pump without a soak time. Put an umbrella (sun shade) over the pipe and run the test. You are definitely overthinking this. A test that small probably would have gotten better advice in Boiler and Pressure Vessel Engineering. Everything I said above was thinking about multi-mile tests with hundreds or thousands of barrels of test fluid. I can't find your pipe size above, but if it is 4-inch your test is around 20 gallons.

Take a look at LittleInch's signature "Remember - More details = better answers". If you had said the pipe size and length at the beginning in your original post, this would have been a very different discussion.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[BigInch]

Boy would it ever.