TY - CONF A1 - Mair, Georg A1 - Scherer, Florian A1 - Scholz, Irene A1 - Schönfelder, Thorsten T1 - The residual strength of breathing air composite cylinders towards the end of their service life - A first assessment of a real-life sample T2 - ASME Pressure Vessels & Piping Conference N2 - Emergency response units increasingly use pressure cylinders made from fibre composites for breathing air as elements of personal protective equipment (PPE). Such applications expose the composite cylinders to harsh temperature and handling conditions. At least in Europe, standards have been used for certifying PPE, which are designed and mandatory for the approval of pressure receptacles for the transport of dangerous goods. Therefore, service conditions specific to PPEs are not accounted for in these standards. In this paper, BAM (Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing) investigates the residual safety of a composite cylinder design at the end of their designated service life of 15 years. The cylinders (test pressure PH 450 bars; 6.8 Litres) are of one design type with aluminium liner and fully wrapped with carbon fibres, which is commonly considered a “Type III” cylinder. All cylinders were used as PPE by the Berlin fire department and randomly picked in three samples of 25 cylinders each before tested. At BAM, the cylinder samples underwent hydraulic load cycle tests (LCT), conventional burst tests (BT) and so called slow burst tests (SBT). A concept for quantification of strength degradation already introduced by BAM was applied. This concept is based on a probabilistic assessment of the average strength and scatter of each sample of cylinders. The strength distributions of the used PPEcylinders is shown and analysed. Some unexpected effects are shown and a refinement of the statistical assessment is introduced. T2 - ASME 2014 Pressure Vessels and Piping Conference CY - Anaheim, CA, USA DA - 20.07.2014 KW - Composite KW - Assessment KW - Cylinder KW - Residual strenght PY - 2014 SN - 978-0-7918-4603-2 SP - PVP2014-28168, 1 EP - 9 AN - OPUS4-40173 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -