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| BorSafe™ material for for the production of large diameter thick walled PE pipes(BorSafe HE3490-LS PE100 material from Borealis.) |
So why did large diameter PE pipes producers choose BorSafe material?
Quite simply because it is the best material for the production of large diameter thick walled PE pipes as demonstrated by a growing number of pipe producers
Indeed the material is better by design because in the Borstar process the polymer is ‘engineered’ to have a higher viscosity at low shear rates.
This means that the material is more resistant to ‘sag’, which is the thickening of the bottom half of the pipe due to the downward flow of the material under gravity as it emerges from the die head.
Sag is easy to demonstrate in practice by the free flow of material through a fixed orifice under gravitational force. As shown in figure 1 there is much lower sag with BorSafe LS grades which means faster start up and better wall thickness control. By better control of the wall thickness the pipe producer can manufacture at a tighter tolerance thereby saving a significant amount of raw material. In addition, if the wall thickness is even, it is very much quicker to bring the pipe within the specification (and for a modern extrusion line running at close to 1 ton per hour this can again lead to significant material savings). |
Large diameter PE pipe has a big future.
The future is indeed bright for large diameter pressure and non pressure pipelines which can now be efficiently produced in non corrodible PE materials. Additional benefits of PE pipe in installation, particularly the use of leak free fusion jointing will mean that more and more large diameter pipelines are laid in PE rather than iron, steel or glass reinforced materials.
This will provide a major boost to the PE pipe industry particularly for those pipe producers who have the foresight to invest in large diameter extrusion lines and are prepared to commit resources to convincing engineers to change project specifications to PE. |
