Equipment for quality assessment of the copper pipes and fittings used within natural gas installations

The present paper describes the equipment conceived, designed and built by the authors, during a complex research program, in order to perform the tests required for the quality assessment of the permanent assembly technologies used within the natural gas installations made of copper pipes. The research work addressed below is part of our effort (detailed in a separate paper [1]) aiming at making possible the use, within the natural gas installations in Romania (alongside steel and polyethylene pipes), of copper pipes assembled using the press fit technology, by aligning the Romanian standards to the European ones. The equipment described in the paper can be used to investigate the dynamic strength under torsion loads, the dynamic strength under bending loads (vibrations) and the operating capacity at high temperature of the joints and fittings for copper pipes.