HoleeCrapp. Air compressor explosion

Pretty scary stuff!

 

Oh boy!

 

look at the cob job welds on some sort of bushing with a petcock some body cobbed in there...also looks like it was leaking and someone welded it up where it broke....play with fire,get burned...dont cry about it

 

video should be retitled to "Grammpy prolly shouldnt a welded this cause he was frugal,and our family 200 years of collective bullchit almost got me killed"

 

I missed the patch job

 

Those non code tanks scare me.
Tap your fingers on some new compressors receivers boy are they thin.
A video on YouTube shows a guys new harbor freight engine drive compressor that blew in the back of his service truck. Did some damage.

 

I saw that too and don’t know what or why it’s there.
Wonder if it was added that extra heavy bung nut. Maybe because it didn’t have blowdown to start with.

The failure didn’t start there though.

Looks like the blowdown wasn’t used. The failure started in the belly, where the condensate would pool, rust, dry, and cycle through that for 200 years of experience.

He never mentioned using the blowdown. Just moving it outside.

I don’t do it religiously, but just did after i saw this.
The brown is tank.

 

He’s lucky! My in laws neighbor is a farmer and got severely injured from a compressor tank rupturing a few years back. Not sure as to why it blew up, but he was hospitalized and in pretty rough shape for a while.

 

HOLEY CHIT! I only run a compressor on the job site and usually blow out the tank when done otherwise rust will form inside. Small Bostitch pancake compressor 30 yrs old.
Lesson learned and luckily nobody was hurt.

 

They receiver tank was rusted out and partially full of water. Ait by itself won't do that much damage. The mass of the water pushing out through the initial crack is what caused that tank to turn inside out and embed rust into everything. The whole garage bay is rust colored now.

I've seen similar damage in service trucks when their auto drains / blow down ports clog up and the tank fails with a tank half full of water.

Yeah, that tank was not maintained correctly. My air compressor has a blow down/drain that doesn't close all the way. I leave it because it will start bubbling and hissing water out after I charge the tank a few times.

 

I believe that you have that backwards. Compressed gas will cause more damage than if the tank had water in it.
Did a fair amount of destructive testing in my younger days and water always lessened the damage.

 

I believe thats true. Water does not compress. It just takes up space.
When we test pipe, we use a hydrostatic pump and remove as much air as possible. That way, if there is a failure during a test (say a pipe joint pushes apart) there is a big loss of pressure, but no violent burst.

 

Boy, I always have been nervous filling those portable air tanks while standing right next to/over them...this video did not help my paranoia either.

 

We have a tank that’s used to move trailers with air brakes. I hate using it!

 

The compressed air in a shop receiver shouldn't have enough mass of air to do that damage. That's a low pressure, thin wall tank, that should have a relief valve set around 150psi. The water in the bottom of the tank is much denser and it's the water mass that pushed the tank apart, lifts it, and mechanically transfers the energy. The rust embedded into stuff allover was not dry dust, it was wet sludge.

I can shoot low pressure shop receivers or similar vessels and no catastrophic tank failure will occured. Just 2 holes. A rusty tank with thin walls still should just leak air at the pin holes. Tanks that have water in them fail big. And they usually have an inoperable pressure relief valves, and some times bad cutoff switches. So the tank is no longer operating within their safe pressure range.


We use water to hydro test a tank while it's submerged in water. The water does not compress when the tank is loaded to proofing pressure. If the volume of water needed to get to proofing load is more than the tanks static pressure volume then it is deforming and will fail inspection. If it catastrophically failed during proofing the water around it dampens the energy transfer. The weight/inertia of the water around the tested tank dampens the shockwave from a catastrophic vessel failure. The surface of the water tank will most definitely jump and splash water.

High pressure pipe, tanks, vessels can be a different animal. Since the gas can be compressed into a liquid the failure of a vessel releases a lot more energy and mechanically couples the energy better. The fluid couples the energy and expands until it gets to atmosphere pressure.

 

When a thin wall non code receiver ruptures it will in fact peal open and not necessarily along the rust line.
A thicker ASME tank will most likely leak first.
There's been a lot of non code receivers that open up and look like the one in the video.
Doesn't take much water to splatter wet rust.

 

If you look closely it might have a expiration date stamped in. Supposed to be scrapped by the date.

 

They do...it's expired

 

I saw this on Youtube but didn't watch it.
Headed there now to check it out.