Best Practices for Bolted Flange Joints
When assembling bolted flange joints, reliability engineers, industry experts, gasket manufacturers, and almost anyone with ‘skin in the game’ agree that utilizing best practices is paramount to overall joint integrity, reliability, and most importantly, safety. A great deal of time and resources have been devoted to identifying those best practices and to training plant maintenance personnel and contractors on proper flange bolt-up. ASME’s post construction committee has detailed numerous methodologies for calculating target torqWhen assembling bolted flange joints, reliability engineers, industry experts, gasket manufacturers, and almost anyone with ‘skin in the game’ agree that utilizing best practices is paramount to overall joint integrity, reliability, and most importantly, safety. ue requirements for bolts in their PCC-1 publication (cf. Appendix J, Appendix K, and Appendix O). Yet, even with all this information available, the leading cause of joint failures and leaks on plants is still poor or improper installation. To mitigate the chance of flange failure it is therefore important to ensure the correct specifications and assembly practices are followed.