During the Spotlight on Specialty Gases: Trends in Markets & Operations webinar, sponsored by Weldcoa, Daval told viewers exactly how Luxfer are ensuring that its cylinders are maintained in the best possible way and the process behind this.
“A long time ago, Luxfer decided to remove acid cleaning from the cylinder manufacturing process,” Daval said. “Acid cleaning is a very common practice in the aluminium cylinder industry to remove dust on the surface of the aluminium. This is an easy way.”
“However, Luxfer for various reasons decided stop acid washing and put in place other means of cleaning that do not damage the layers of aluminium in the cylinder.”
Explaining the company’s decision to remove acid cleaning from its processes, Daval said that the composition of speciality gases must remain constant in the cylinders.
He commented, “These compositions must remain constant in the cylinders and that means that there is almost no interaction between the gas and on the surface of the aluminium.”
Although commonly used for industrial practice, it is believed that acid cleaning can lead corrosion and surface pitting of gas cylinders, as well as posing some risk of cross contamination[1].
After discussing acid cleaning and the reasons why Luxfer no longer use the process, Daval then touched on the importance and challenges that are with paired with consistency when manufacturing cylinders for customers.
“One of the mains challenges with manufacturing is to get very good consistency with the production. Consistency is key for a batch of cylinders, from the cylinder number to the serial number and the quality of the surface must remain the same.”
“With some cylinders you [a customer] will need to receive the same cylinder to ensure that it is filled with the accurate gas.”
“It looks practically easy, but we had to train our people. It is not easy, making the inspection of the inside of the cylinders but we have trained our people.”
To watch Daval’s talk with gasworldtv in full click here. Alternatively, you can watch the full Spotlight on Specialty Gases: Trends in Markets & Operations in full here.