A small leak in a sub-assembly or a component is enough to affect your product’s performance and your reputation. A high-quality product earns customers’ trust and has a positive impact on your profitability.
Leak testing is an integral part of the quality control process. It is important to choose a reliable test method and the choice of method depends on a variety of aspects. Every year, manufacturers carry out over a billion leak tests on some of their most important products. The most common method is to submerge the part to be tested underwater and look for bubbles. However, there are some major limitations to the underwater leak testing method.
Not suitable for all applications
The underwater leak testing method is not suitable for every product. Sometimes a leaking package may not produce any bubbles when underwater. With no leakage in a few packages, the tester can get bored and miss a leaking packet. There is no automatic log of all the tests done and the results so they have to be manually recorded. Also ,the package comes out wet after the test and often needs to be discarded which is a cost.
Wrong timing
It is important to give due consideration when choosing the right stage for testing in the production stage. When it comes to individual subcomponents, it’s ideal to test them for leakage before assembly.
For instance, it’s better to check whether a transmission case is tight enough before the transmission assembly. In case the housing fails during the final stage and should be rejected, all the effort of assembling the transmission would be in vain.
Temperature change
Fluctuating temperature is a huge issue, especially when it comes to testing using differential pressure measurement or pressure decay. Even a tiny change in the temperature can completely change the measurable leak rate. Even the size of the leak undergoes a change as the temperature increases.
For instance, in exhaust gas coolers, in certain instances, leakage occurs only when the component reaches the typical operating temperature. Consequently, a lot of manufacturers carry these tests in climatic chambers.
Testing contaminated parts
No matter the product you are testing, it’s important to carry out the testing on unused and new test pieces. If the components have already been used or have been filled with water or oil, there’s a risk that tiny leaks might have already been blocked.
It is important to clean the test piece thoroughly before carrying out the leak test. Once cleaned, the part should be completely dried to ensure the cleaning fluid doesn’t clog the leak.
Not maintaining the test equipment
If leak rates haven’t been measured for days on end, it means that either the production quality is stellar or that the test equipment isn’t functioning right.
It is important to ensure that the leak testing equipment is working well. You can do this by verifying the leak rate with a reference leak. If the leak rate isn’t determined at the testing stage, the system has problems.
In Conclusion
The leak testing system has some essential flaws which render it unreliable for testing leaks. Sealtick provides high quality testing equipment that is much more advanced and reliable and right for your application. Get in touch with us today for more information.
