Swagelok Gas Distribution Systems

The program that Swagelok has developed allows our customers to feel better that their systems are being taken care of and that there is actual ownership. They can focus on running their business and using the gas, which is really what they want to do.

The gas distribution program enables a modular platform that can meet a wide range of needs to deliver those gases safely and efficiently through a laboratory, plant, or analytical system.

They know there is leakage that comes along with needed maintenance and servicing, not to forget the downtime that might happen to the process. If you have a reliable system in place, you don’t have to worry about all these things.

It’s intended to tackle the problems associated with taking gas from a cylinder source to any point of use they may have, so the customer doesn’t have to design their whole system from scratch.

What we have done is optimize the size of our panel designs: small enough to fit where they need to be, but also big enough to remain easily serviceable.

The SSI is the Swagelok Source Inlet. It’s designed to take the pressure from the gas bottle through the bottle connector, through the filter, and to the panel.

It connects the bottle to the first stage of regulation. As we were engineering it, we discovered a need for a lot of variation. Many customers need to connect more than one bottle at a time, so it’s configurable for supplying gas from one bottle to many bottles manifolded together.

The SGP is the Swagelok Gas Panel. It is the main delivery panel and would be used at the bottle. The bottle is obviously coming in at a few hundred bar or a few hundred psig, so we need to drop that down for distribution around the customer’s site.

That initial panel can be highly configurable. There are quite a few options around whether it’s a single-stage or dual-stage panel. It’s really there to do that main drop in pressure to get the gas around the customer’s site at a comfortable distribution pressure.

You can set your system pressure right there as it’s coming out of the bottle. Instead of having individual bottle regulators, you have one, so it’s a lot more cost-effective and a lot easier to control.

The other primary regulation option would be the SCO. That’s our new standard changeover. That’s an assembly that can accept gas inputs from two separate sources. It’s designed to draw from only one source at a time.

Once the primary source has depleted itself to the changeover pressure, it will automatically and seamlessly begin drawing from the second source. That allows the customer to have uninterrupted gas supply as they need to change their bottles out.

The new design allows us to change over at a much lower pressure. So, what does that do for our customers? It allows them to use more of the gas in the bottles, saving them money and reducing the amount of excess gas sent back to the supplier. Now, they are using almost everything they are paying for.

The Swagelok Point-of-Use system is designed so that once manifold pressure has been distributed around the site, it can take that gas to its point of use. It can then be controlled by the end user to change the pressure depending on what is required on the back end.

The point-of-use system is designed to be very compact, with a variety of mounting options to accommodate many different needs. We’ve seen customers who needed to mount them on a bench, below a bench in various labs, or along Unistrut on the wall.

So, through the development of our gas distribution program, we took a lot of time to listen to our customers and hear about how they perform maintenance or troubleshoot these systems.