Baiqian Li, Jun Wang, Lixian Zheng, Xiaoyi Peng, Lei Wang, Yu Cui, Guozhi Xu
Papers # 2018 Las-Vegas
Polyethylene/Aluminum/Polyethylene (PAP) composite pipe has the advantages of corrosion resistance, limited joints and convenient installation. Nowadays PAP pipes are widely used in indoor gas conveyance. But a number of companies encounter difficulties in installing gas meter in users’ house as well as billing. Some customers try to solve this problem by setting all the gas meters together outdoors and using the unplasticized PVC (UPVC) pipe cased PAP pipes. In order to promote this application, we put our effort on studying the effects of environmental temperature, sealing reliability, resistance to pipe pull-out, thermal compensation, and rodent damage on PAP pipe and solve these problems.
Traditional metal pipes (e.g. galvanized pipe) have been used for indoor gas conveyance. However, it has the inherent defects of easy corrosion, excessive joints and complicated installation process. Polyethylene/Aluminum/Polyethylene (PAP) composite pipe has the advantages of corrosion resistance, limited joints and convenient installation. We started to use the PAP pipe in fuel gas conveyance 21 years ago. It has excellent performance in indoor gas application. Later, a unique method was designed to apply the PAP pipe in outdoor gas conveyance with the appearance of outdoor gas meter setting, which involves the addition of UPVC casing pipe as a protection technique to prevent the aging of PAP pipe. The method allows the PAP pipe to be installed on the outer wall of building and meter and the pipe contains no intermediate joints. Since 1996, the number of users has increased gradually and it achieves millions of installations globally as of today. These installations have taken place in Europe, Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa. There have been no quality or performance issues by using the PAP pipe in fuel gas conveyance indoor and outdoor for the past 20 years. In order to popularize this technique in China, we had participated in the development of relevant standard specification, such as national standard (GB50028-2006), industry standard (CJJ94-2009) and association standard (CECS264-2009).