Competent Authority compliant, ATI provides a wealth of testing and inspection services around the world, as Dr Roy S. Irani, Gas Package Solutions (GPS) Ltd, discovers.
Founded over 35 years ago, Authorized Testing Incorporated (ATI) is a highly regarded inspection and consultancy agency which specialises in the approvals of all sorts of pressure vessels and in particular gas cylinders. The company continues to build on established practices but never loses sight of current requirements, as can be evidenced by the prototype testing last month of the largest composite cylinder ever made, at its remote 100 acre test site in the Californian High Desert (Fig.1). Here we see a test on a 6.1m high x 3.2m OD non-metallic lined composite cylinder bursting at a pressure of over 500 bar!
Test facilities
With its headquarters based in Riverside, California (Fig. 2) the company not only provides a confidential service to cylinder manufacturers, but also offers a cylinder design qualification service, through its well-equipped laboratory of full pulsation test equipment capable of 20000 psi (1380 bar), thermal /environmental cycling, burst testing facility up to 65000 psi (4480 bar) and the entire suite of techniques one would expect in an advanced cylinder test house (Fig.3).
Also certain properties, such as the rupture strength of individual components like the actual fibres used in composite cylinders, including glass, Aramide and carbon are routinely measured. The quality of ATI’s equipment is matched by its competent test operatives, who are fully trained and certified to HAZMAT requirements.
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