VENTIL - Making Safety a Simple Choice

Pressure testing is inherently dangerous. A combination of pressure and volume translates into kinetic energy whenever the object under pressure fails. This hidden danger – invisible to anyone in the area – has the potential to cause serious injuries or deaths.

Anyone in the valve industry has heard stories of incidents with severe consequences. In most cases, these could have been avoided with additional safety systems, whether procedures, interlocks, or physical barriers. Yet in practice it is difficult to quantify safety and guarantee protection. A key reason is the absence of clear standards. No uniform guideline exists for designing safety enclosures for pressure testing in factory environments.

Confronted with this reality, VENTIL set out to make safety a simple choice. The goal: create an intuitive method to determine the minimum required level of safety.

A research project, combining theoretical analysis and practical validation, led to the development of four standard Safety Protection Levels (SPL). The strength of this model is its simplicity: a selection matrix based only on valve size and pressure class. The underlying principle is straightforward: larger valves create larger projectiles, and higher pressure classes result in higher velocities.

Behind the simplicity lies extensive risk analysis. All possible failure cases are considered, from residual air in hydrostatic testing, to gas testing risks, small projectiles such as plugs, weld failures, blast waves, and even the loss of large valve sections.

The SPL enclosures are engineered to withstand all of these scenarios, even when the worst possible happens. These SPL designs include high-impact steels, sandwich panels, and validated impact testing to ensure nothing penetrates the enclosure in worst-case failures.

SPL 3 High-impact - Test bench set-up for HP valves

VENTIL SPL1 – Protect, shields the operator by breaking the line of fire. A mix of steel and polycarbonate protects against projectiles, with interlocks and a dead-man switch to prevent unsafe operation.

VENTIL SPL2 – Safeguard, offers full surrounding walls with reinforced locks and electronic interlocks.

VENTIL SPL3 – High-impact, combines thicker steel with energy-absorbing panels to handle severe impacts and avoid ricochets.

VENTIL SPL4 – Bunker, is a customized solution for extreme pressure-volume combinations, designed through dedicated risk assessments to guarantee safety without exponential cost increases.

With SPL, safety becomes a simple, reliable, and affordable choice.

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