Many Users Didn’t Use Accumulator Correctly
Are you using accumulators correctly?
This is a real case from our customer, who is a global Fortune 500 company in Europe as an engineering giant. They bought the accumulators from us last year for their own application and finally all of them failed in bladder damage.
According to our experience, bladder damage is very rare especially during the new use. Most of the bladder failures happen durging the installation as a result of improper operation or pre-charging. Please see our another technical article Bladder Failure Cause & Prevention.
The customer provided the following presentation of their application:
Remember, when the accumulator is in normal use, the pressure inside the bladder should always be lower than the system pipeline pressure. In another word, the bladder should never touch the poppet valve during normal use. The accumulator is never emptied of fluid during normal operation.
The customer released the system pressure quickly to the minimum, forcing the high pressure bladder to hit the poppet valve strongly and got cut by the edge. (same principle when using diaphragm accumulators)
Solution
We do not recommed using accumulators in different and nonconventional ways unless you know it very well. Many customers use accumulators as a control valve for their different applications. This is not unusual. Be careful if you are doing so. We do not gurantee our accumulators will work properly on your custom applications. We are not responsible for any damage or failure casued by it.
For above test, the customer can try to add an isolating safety block between the accumulators to the system pipeline, separating the accumulator pressure from the system pressure before releasing the system pressure. But since this is a total diffreent use of accumulators, we do not have more suggestions on it.
Summary
Our product and service are for the customers who are using it in a normal way. This is the prerequisite on which design and calculation are based. Remember the following basic rule of accumulator bladder pre-charging pressure:
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