New materials intended for use within natural gas installations and quality testing procedures

"Traditionally, in Romania, steel pipes and fittings are used within the natural gas supply installations. However, in many European Union countries, other types of materials are also used: copper made pipes and fittings, respectively multiple-layers pipes of PEXAL type. The present paper describes the results of the research work performed by the authors aiming at aligning the Romanian standards to the European ones, in order to make possible the use of these materials within the natural gas installations in Romania, besides steel and polyethylene. Such work had as main result the development and certification of a set of testing procedures (described in this paper) required for the quality assessment of the assembly technologies (with press fit or hard soldered joints) of copper pipes and fittings, including the design and construction of the equipment needed in order to perform these tests (presented in a separate paper [1])."