<p>Most industrial manufacturing or process plants use bolted connections to transfer media from one location to another. Gaskets are often used to seal these systems as they offer high levels of leak mitigation; however, despite their nearly universal usage, testing done on gaskets has been fairly limited. Historically, while industrial applications use gaskets at various temperatures and pressures, load retention tests have been conducted at a set temperature, time duration and compressive stress and report the result as load lost or retained.&nbsp; They do not account for longer time periods, the characteristics of the load loss over time or internal pressure the gasket is sealing. This current study seeks to change that. Traditional flat gaskets at thicknesses of 1/16” and 1/8” are leveraged against novel textured PTFE gaskets in order to compare load retention behavior across a range of styles. Different filler materials are tested as well, from aluminosilicate microspheres to barium sulfate and silica. Some design of experiments (DOE) methods are applied in order to characterize the factors that are most responsible for the load relaxation response of any particular type of gasket. A parameter from a previous study, efficiency, is used as an overall metric to quantify gasket performance. Furthermore, overall gasket deformation is examined in order to validate the statistical findings. Lastly, an empirical equation is presented that may be able to characterize gasket behavior across multiple loading and environmental conditions, as well as estimate the residual load carrying capacity of a gasket.</p>

Statistical and Lifetime Characterization of PTFE Materials for Extreme Environments

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/PVP2021/volume/85314

ASME 2021 Pressure Vessels & Piping Conference (PVP2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.