In fact, with an annual production capacity of 950,000 tonnes of finished product, over 2,300 employees, 5 production facilities, and an independently operated 120 Mw power station that renders the facility in Dalmine energetically autonomous, TenarisDalmine is Italy’s leading domestic manufacturer of seamless steel pipes for the energy, automotive, and mechanical industries. Within the scope of TenarisDalmine’s rich production scenario, which consists of extremely high numbers, the company also operates an efficient testing laboratory: a structure run by the Quality Management department that manages and executes all the destructive and non-destructive pipe testing activities of a mechanical, chemical and corrosive nature.
“The laboratory”, explains Daniele Persiani, Laboratory Coordinator for TenarisDalmine, “is divided into 5 sections: test preparation, mechanical testing, metallography, corrosion, and chemical analysis. We receive approximately 5,000 pipe sections from all of our Italian facilities on a monthly basis, from which we obtain an average of about 12,000 finished test samples per month (with peaks of up to 16,000). A new section called Special Testing was recently created, which handles special tests only required by clients who work in certain countries and for specific industries: examples include the burst test on pipes for airbags, or the collapse tests on pipes for oil wells. Prior to delivery, each pipe must have passed all the tests required by the client”.
Due to the need to manufacture pipes of increasingly greater thickness, the test preparation section has been equipped with waterjet machines in order to expedite the preparation of the test samples with more efficient pipe section cutting operations. “For us, waterjet technology is the solution that best satisfies our requirements”, confirms Marco Perletti, Laboratory technician, “and in 2010 we purchased our first Primus 202 system by Intermac. Based on our positive experience with this system, which has shown itself to be extremely functional for our types of processing activities, in 2011 we decided to make a second investment by purchasing a machine similar to the previous one, but entirely customised to meet our specific needs.