How do you check the quality of a pipe that’s longer than a transport trailer and heavier than a pickup truck based on the produced pipe thickness?
That was the question Infra Pipes shares with Massload. As the biggest producer of polyethylene pipe in North America, they needed a reliable way to be able to confirm that every pipe coming off the line was built to specification.
The challenge: confirming quality on a very large product
Polyethylene pipes are made through a process called extrusion. If you get the wall thickness, material density, and dimensions right, the pipe performs exactly as engineered.
To track it, Infra Pipe measures wall thickness with ultrasonic equipment and uses those readings to calculate each pipe’s theoretical weight.
But given the size and length of Infra Pipe’s pipes, ultrasonic readings fall short: measuring at a handful of points tells you about those points, not the whole story.
Infra Pipes needed a quick and reliable way to check the whole pipe, they needed a single check that would tell them everything they needed to know about the pipe, without slowing down their production.
The insight: weight is a whole-pipe quality signal
You can calculate a theoretical weight for any given pipe based on its construction: how thick the walls are, how long it is, and how dense the material is.
That theoretical figure is what a perfect pipe should weigh. If you weigh the actual finished pipe and compare it to the theoretical weight, the gap between the two tells something real about the whole part.
At Infra Pipes, the acceptance criteria is: if the actual weight is within 1% of the theoretical weight, the pipe is good to go. Any bigger deviation is a red flag that something is off the specification.
So the weight becomes a fast and reliable quality metric for the whole pipe, eliminating the need to guess about the sections you didn’t measure.
But that only works if the scale is trustworthy. To reliably catch a 1% deviation on a pipe weighing as much as 10,000 lb, the system has to resolve well under 100 lb and do it consistently in a working plant environment.
That’s a precision job, and one Massload is well suited to: precision weighing has been our specialty since 1981.
The solution: match the right components for the application
The weigh system we put together is rated to 15,000 kg and reads in 5 kg increments, so it resolves changes nearly ten times finer than the 1% threshold it needs to catch.
It uses:
- 4 pcs CBL 5,000 kg load cells: one at each corner, sharing the load and giving the platform a comfortable headroom over the heaviest pipe at roughly 10,000 lb.
- 4 pcs V100000 weigh modules: the mounting assemblies that seat each load cell correctly, so the weight transfers cleanly and accurately.
- 4 sets of PT END and TENDITORE constraint: the hardware combination added to the load cell setup that protects the load cell from damage due to horizontal side force produced when loading and unloading the pipe in the scale and accidental bump to the scale by the forklift.
- 1 pc TLM8 weight transmitter: allows four load cells to be connected directly to the transmitter (eliminates the need for a junction box) and displays the total weight. Easy to troubleshoot a defective load cell with build in diagnostic function.
- 1 pc weatherproof enclosure with a rechargeable battery: Protects the transmitter from environmental conditions and flexibility to place the scale anywhere in the pipe yard with no available AC or DC power source.
Assembled, those components make up a weighing platform of roughly 15 ft × 10 ft, large enough to take a full pipe.
A forklift operator loads a finished pipe on the scale, records the weight, and compares it to the theoretical target weight in a short period of time.
The results
With the scale running for about a month, these benefits stand out:
- Accurate quality checks every time: Infra Pipes have greater confidence that a good pipe is a good pipe that goes to their customer, and a rejected pipe is a bad pipe that goes back for re-processing.
- Improve weighing efficiency because one scale can do the job instead of using multiple crane scales, which was considered as another way of weighing the produced pipe.
- Simplify scale maintenance: because one scale is doing all the work.
- Easier to adjust: now they have a way to verify the weight of a bad pipe that failed the pipe thickness measurement, then adjust the process to eliminate and reduce bad pipes produced.
Infra Pipe’s engineering team is happy with what they’re seeing:
“The data we’ve got so far is great, and the load cells and everything else are working as promised. We’re monitoring results and waiting for the winter weather to test how the whole system copes under those conditions.”
— Emmanuel Aseme, NA Engineering Manager, Infra Pipe
A Prairie solution to a heavy problem
One nice bonus: this whole project stayed in Saskatchewan from start to finish. A local pipe manufacturer needed a solution, and a local weighing manufacturer came up with one.
If you’re in the same boat: verifying product quality, batching, or process weight, the hard part is often knowing which products will actually do the job.
Sometimes that’s a set of proven standard weigh modules like these; sometimes it calls for a custom solution.
Either way, matching the right components to the application is what Massload’s experts do best.
Tell us about your application and we’ll point you to the right fit.
