Difference Between Aluminum And Stainless Steel Pipe And Tube

Metal pipe and tubing are everywhere in automotive, aerospace, industrial, architectural, research, and medical applications. The most common elements are aluminum and stainless steel pipe and tube materials, and each has attributes that make it the right choice for a given industry. Once you’ve determined whether you need piping or tubing, next you’ll want to choose the best metal for your application.

Choosing the Right MetalTubing specialists can also advise you on tubing size and fabrication processes. Stainless steel tubing comes in fractional and metric outer diameters (ODs) ranging from 1/16 to 8 in. for tubing and to as small as 0.008 in. for hypodermic applications. Fabrication can include bending, coiling, end forming, welding, and cutting.

Once you have the right stainless steel tubing installed in your application, you might start to think about what to do with it at the end of its useful life. Although the alloying elements that go into stainless steel make it difficult to recycle, rest assured that about 50% of all new stainless steel is fabricated from melted down steel scrap.

Difference Between Seamless And Erw Stainless Steel Pipe

Seamless Steel Pipe is made from a solid round steel ‘billet’ which is heated and pushed or pulled over a form until the steel is shaped into a hollow tube. Billets are procured both from indigenous suppliers and from abroad. Major Indigenous suppliers are JSPL, JSW & Kalyani and steel round billets are imported from renowned mills from Europe, Far East countries, Canada, China.

To Manufacture ERW Stainless Steel Pipes HR Coils are required. Major Indigenous suppliers of these HR Coils are SAIL, Essar, JSW, Lloyds etc.

Electric Resistance Welding (ERW) pipe is manufactured by rolling metal and then welding it longitudinally across its length. Seamless pipe is manufactured by extruding the metal to the desired length; therefore ERW pipe have a welded joint in its cross-section, while seamless pipe does not have any joint in its cross-section through-out its length.For tube, pipe, and profile production, reducing the downtime between production runs is one of the most effective ways to reach lean manufacturing objectives. Flexible Cold Forming® (FCF) is a cage forming process that provides an alternative to the conventional forming process. It reduces mill downtime and can help a tube producer remain viable.

How It Works

Like conventional forming, cage forming pulls a continuous strip of material through tooling rolls to change its shape. The main difference concerns how the tooling works. The conventional process uses one set of roll tools for each diameter produced on the mill. Cage forming uses one set of tooling for every diameter produced on the mill. In other words, it uses a universal tool set. This means that when the operator switches from one diameter to another, he doesn’t have to go through a lengthy tool-change process. In a few minutes one operator can adjust the tooling to new positions for the next production run.