What You Should Choose: Pipe Or Tube?

There are many instances when Pipe and Tube serves the similar purpose. If a fluid has to move from point A to point B; both tubes and pipes can do this. So what you should—pipe or tube? It’s a million dollar question.

But the answer is not as difficult as it seems. In order to use pipe, you must cut it, debur it, and then get it threaded so that it could be wrapped with a PTFE tape or you may choose to cover it with a sealant. The pipe fittings are then tightened. This is what you need to do with pipe. However, it’s where the flaw of using pipes becomes pretty obvious.

Lets understand it properly. First of all you wrench tight which is quite a subjective process. It largely depends on how much strength installer exerts during the process. Apart from that, there is a possibility that elbow point may be over tightened which may become a source of leakage in future. And what happens if it’s under tightened, it may again cause a leakage.

Therefore, whatever you do there is a fair chance that a pipe will result in a leakage. When you try to repair the leakage, you need to disassemble the piping system which may affect other joints. Additionally, this system may generate potential leak points.

Advantages of using tubes

Now we consider the whole scenario from the perspective of tubes. The process is much simpler and safe. What you need is to use a single length of tubing and two tube fitting. When it needs bending, you needed to cut the pipe; but tubes are naturally bent. So you don’t need extra cutting or threading. A bend in the tubing creates less pressure drop than a pipe system.

Tubing Vs Pipe

By now you must have understood the benefit of tubes over pipes. Tube fitting enable easy access to other system components. Tubing system is much stronger than a similar length piping system. The pipe may be heavier. But the thick part is not for the purpose to tolerate turbulence and pressure drops; but it’s for the purpose of threading.

So building any industrial installations with pipes creates a heavy system. It needs extra maintenance cost and more headache in maintenance. A heavier pipe system puts a lot of stress on the whole system. Tubing system makes the whole system lighter and easy to maintain as it has a better strength to weight ratio. A quality tube product such as Seal Excel may drastically bring down the maintenance cost of your industrial installation because of less possibility of leakages and support cost.

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