Gas Appliance

Essential tests which must be performed.

All gas appliances used for cooking, heating, refrigerating or even soldering must be leak tested and flow checked during their manufacture to ensure they are safe for use.

Leak Detection.The FCO284 Gas Appliance Leak Detector is designed specifically for Leak Detection in Gas Appliances. When testing finished products for leakage, it is essential to be able to identify and rectify any leaks without having to move the appliance to a rework station. The FCO284 facilitates this by showing a live leak reading. This allows an operator to check and tighten couplings on the appliance with visual feedback of the result.

Appliances which incorporate gas valves will need to be leak tested with valves open and closed. The FCO284 can be configured to operate a series of leak tests on the appliance achieve this.

Component testing.

To reduce the chances of failure at the final appliance test stage, all parts of a gas appliance are leak tested at their manufacturing stage. These parts are tested to a tighter leak specification so that the accumulated leak from all parts does not exceed the leakage allowed for the final appliance. These parts are normally tested using the FCO730 or FCO750 Leak Detectors as the need to rectify leaks using the continuous flow principle does not apply.

Flow checking gas burners.

Each burner of a Gas appliances must be tested to ensure that it produces its specified heat output. This is achieved by measuring the volumetirc flow rate of gas for each burner in its low and high flow positions.

The FCO200 is designed specifically for the flow testing of gas burners/injectors. To do this it has certain unique features over normal volume or mass flow-meters which make it suitable for the job.

The instrument has both flow and pressure measuring sensors allowing it to display test pressure and flow-rate at the same time.
The instrument has up to 99 test programmes for different flow rates and pressures. These test programmes can be sequenced together in series to carry out all the tests on a gas appliance without delay.
The resistance to flow and the response of the FCO200 are exceptionally good. The overall resistance is about 1 mbar, important when the available pressure is only 20+ mbar; and the response is less than 1 second, important in achieving fast results.
To help in the decision making about the correct flow value a percentage window can be programmed which will give FLOW HIGH/PASS/FLOW LOW lamps on the front panel and remote control box of the instrument. A typical window of acceptance would be ±5%.
One of the more important advanced features is the pressure compensation capability that corrects the flow reading automatically with any minor variations in test pressure. Therefore if the required test pressure is programmed at 20 mbar and the pressure drops to 19 mbar, then normally the flow reading will be low. Using the pressure compensation the flow reading will be calculated higher back to the value that would be correct at 20 mbar.
The instrument has a built-in temperature sensor that automatically compensates for ambient temperature variations.

Data Collection.

All modern appliance manufacturers must keep leak and flow test results for every product manufactured to provide product tracability. Furness Controls leak detectors and flow meters can be fully controlled from a computer system and they can pass their test results to the computer for dataloging.