From providing life support to powering critical manufacturing machinery, industrial gas cylinders are fulfilling modern medical and manufacturing requirements. The robust structure, excellent security measures, and easy-to-transport design allow industries to store their essential gases safely.
This comprehensive blog post aims to unravel the versatile role of gas cylinders in industrial applications along with industrial gas cylinders benefits.
A] Introduction to Industrial Gas Cylinder
Industrial gas cylinders are highly pressurised gas containers that are used to store and transport gases, such as hydrogen, oxygen, argon, helium, or nitrogen. They are typically built with high-strength materials like steel, aluminium, or composite metals. Its rigorous design and robust build quality allow cylinders to withstand harsh industrial conditions. From medicine to the agriculture industry, almost every industry has been utilising industrial gas cylinders for different purposes. They come in different sizes to fulfil individual gas storage capacity demands without compromising their quality and safety.
B] Role of Gas Cylinders in Industrial Applications
1. Medical Industry
Oxygen gas cylinders play a vital role in the medical industry, providing oxygen to patients who have difficulty breathing or dealing with other conditions, such as asthma, pneumonia, surgery, and other life-support health problems. These medical oxygen cylinders are equipped with a pin index safety system to mitigate the chances of wrong cylinder integration. Generally, medical oxygen cylinders are coated white in India to facilitate intuitive recognition. They have size flexibility to cater to distinct medical requirements.
2. Food and Beverage Industry
Industrial gas cylinders are predominantly used in the food and beverages industry for various applications, such as carbonation, modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), glass chilling, and aeration. The aforementioned applications of gas cylinders in the F&B industry help enhance product quality and extend products’ shelf lives. Industrial gas cylinders are designed to efficiently and safely store food-grade gases like oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Further, these food-grade gases help maintain food’s freshness and preserve its taste.
3. Chemical Industry
Industrial gas cylinders play a prominent role in the chemical industry as they store and dispense essential gases, such as hydrogen, methanol, and carbon dioxide to facilitate efficient chemical operations. These cylinders are built from high-strength material and vetted by the experts thoroughly to ensure optimum safety from leakage. Due to excellent gas-controlling capabilities, industrial cylinders are utilised in various chemical operations, including chemical synthesis. It ensures gas is dispensed at a specific pressure, contributing precise and accurate gas dispensing at the time of chemical processes.
4. Manufacturing Industries
The manufacturing industry is one of the prominent users of industrial gas cylinders. Manufacturing processes, such as welding, metal heat treatment, raw materials quality controls, and manufactured product safety testing, utilise essential gases, such as acetylene, oxygen, argon, helium, and carbon dioxide. These gases are stored in industrial gas containers safely to keep the manufacturing operations intact and promote plant safety.
5. Sports Industry
Industrial gas cylinders are widely used in various sports activities, including diving and paintball. Deep-sea driving utilises heliox (a mixture of oxygen-helium) gas to reduce the nitrogen narcosis when a driver goes into the deep level of the sea. On the other hand, paintball utilises industrial gas cylinders to power paintball and shoot the opponent when the operator presses the trigger. These cylinders come in tailored sizes for storing HPA (High-pressure Air) and carbon dye-oxide gas.
6. Welding and Metal Fabrication
Welding is a process of joining two metal parts to each other. In this process, a mixture of acetylene and oxygen gas-filled cylinders is used to ignite the hot flame and join the metal parts together. On the other hand, metal fabrication processes, such as cutting, brazing, soldering, shielding, heating, and metal treating are performed with the help of various gases, such as acetylene, hydrogen, argon, blue flame plus, and nitrogen. Industrial gas cylinders are meticulously designed to store these gases safely and help ease the process.
7. Oil and Gas Industry
Oxygen, nitrogen, and argon are those gases that are heavily used in the oil and gas industry. These gases need a safe and robust container that can contain them safely despite the tough handling processes. Industrial gas cylinders offer the required safety and robustness for storing the essential gases of the oil and gas industry. These cylinders play a pivotal role in optimising process economy, enhancing plant safety, and promoting environmental sustainability.
8. Metal Melting
LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas) and natural gas are two of the main gases that are used in metal melting. Industrial gas cylinders are pressure vessels that are used to store these high-pressure gases above the atmospheric pressure. Essential metal-melting gases are safely stored in these robust gas containers. Further, they are utilised to generate high-temperature flame and thus melt the metal.
9. Agriculture & Farming
As technology is evolving, the agriculture and farming industry is adopting several modern technologies to enhance their production. Modern-technology-equipped industrial gas cylinders are helping agriculture and farming processes, such as heating greenhouses, drying crops, pest control, and powering farming equipment. These robust gas containers store and facilitate the controlled dispensing of farming-centric gases, such as methane, oxygen, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide.
10. Construction
Construction involves several processes, such as welding, metal cutting, and concrete curing processes, that require controlled release of gases, such as argon, oxygen, and acetylene. Industrial gas cylinders are used to safely store and provide the controlled release of gases to ensure the efficacy of constructional operations.
C] Benefits of Using Gas Cylinders in Industrial Applications
- Portable and Easy to Transport: Industrial cylinders are designed to facilitate ease of transporting. The portable and lightweight structure of cylinders helps operators to do so.
- Compact Storage of Gases: Industrial cylinders allow storage of high-pressure gases in a compact container.
- High-pressure Containment: Industrial cylinders are made to withstand overpressure situations and prevent them from exploding.
- Enhanced Safety with Proper Handling: If handled properly, industrial cylinders are equipped with robust safety measures that safeguard workers from unforeseen events.
- Easy Integration into Existing Systems: Industrial cylinders are designed to integrate various industrial gas application systems without encountering fitting issues.
Conclusion
Industrial gas cylinders play a pivotal role in industrial applications, offering a robust solution for safely storing explosive or non-explosive gases. Their transportation-friendly design, seamless integration with existing industrial systems, extremely robust construction, and high-pressure containment make them reliable containers for storing and dispensing various gases safely.
Rama Cylinders is one of the largest manufacturers of industrial gas cylinders in the world. We have sold over 7 million industrial cylinders globally. Our NGV cylinders are made with German technology to ensure they are safe, reliable, and efficient for a variety of industries. We are also pioneers in tailoring the cylinders to industrial requirements. Contact us today!