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In this company, I worked in the cleanroom and built and tested Regulators, Relief Valves, and Emergency Relief Manifolds in the main. One of my best designs here was on the main test rig. It only used Nitrogen, but I proposed and partly designed it to be able to test with Helium also. The need was that some regulators designed for Oxygen use had to have tests run with a thinner gas. Before this setup, that meant I had to leave the cleanroom, which might contaminate the product. The engineers were on board but concerned about the possibility of me inadvertently allowing Nitrogen back to the Helium source. The danger was because the Nitrogen holding bottle was higher pressure than the Helium - around 5000psi. there was a possibility of rupturing the tank, or worse, exploding it. I, therefore, proposed gauges and isolators in certain places so that at a glance, it was apparent (to the trained eye) which gas was going in and what the pressure was, also what gas, was isolated. As we used the products I made, I was able to keep things up to date and perfectly functional.
To the left is an Emergency Relief Manifold, used in Places like Hospitals. They would be linked to Emergency Gas backup supplies and would be activated if or when the main gas supply was interrupted. Or if there was an emergency.
We fabricated a lot of the pipe-work and had welders, etc. As we also produced a lot of larger Manifolds.
Far left is a two-stage regulator which takes in high pressure to the rear, for example, 300 bar, and outputs to the front at around 20 bar. The front part then handles the lower stage pressure. Most regulators were built in Brass, although we did steel too. Designs were modified often, and it was not uncommon for our engineers to be filing several patents a week. It was a very evolving environment, and creativity was encouraged.
This picture is a close-up shot of the control area for the Helium I described earlier. The regulator on the left is for low-pressure Nitrogen testing. The center is a high-pressure airline for removing particles from regulators before assembling as potentially a speck of metal dust could cause a fire or explosion in a Gas such as Oxygen.
To the right is my safety design for the Helium. I could isolate it (but I could also do that on the red lever at the bottom). I could vent it using the valve to the far right. The steel valve just above it to the left is an emergency relief valve. And far-left a dial to show the pressure. That meant that although I didn't have a master control as the main rig did. I was able to test at a lower pressure than the inlet pressure. And consequently, I had variable pressure.
Above are a few things I designed that enabled me to do my job better. Some were quite ingenious in that I devised better and more efficient ways to test. Somethings I had invented, when a new product and had to be tested, and had nothing that suited. Simple examples were the nut pictured in the top right picture. Before I devised that, the tester verified there were no leaks by intermittently squirting a syringe filled with a soap solution around the nozzles of regulators. This test was supposed to run for around five minutes. I got an open nut, drilled a hole, and inserted a circular piece of perspex, and had a seal to prevent leakage. I would attach the nut and tighten until the hole position was at the top and then fill with the soap solution. If there was a leak, it was then apparent as it looked like a washing machine. To empty, I would hold a vessel underneath and rotate anti-clockwise 180 degrees and let the mixture drain out. This saved time in that I didn't need to stand there for five minutes and was also safer as I didn't need to stand directly in front of a possibly faulty valve with 300 bar pressure behind it. It was more accurate in that the valve was 100% submerged so that the smallest leak from anywhere would have been immediately visible.
The test jigs (bottom center) were another novel design, in that they replaced ineffective long bars that were prone to bending and that also had to be fixed between two spaced vices. These jigs could be mounted in one vice and were secure. They were held tightly and spaced according to the regulators they were intentioned to test. I attached gauges and valves that enabled me to keep the pressure and monitor through a process of elimination which regulators were failing or passing without retesting individual ones.
Again as I mentioned before, this was largely facilitated by the company in that when I had a good idea, as long as I presented it well, they were, on the whole, generally implemented. I did not build any of this, except the nut. Everything else required machining, fabrication, or professional engineering design from my base idea. The point was that the company was open to ideas, and that inspired me to do better and ultimately benefitted us all.
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