How strong are CF tanks?

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2fast2furious

Member
Jun 25, 2019
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Minnesota, United States
Hpa no doubt is dangerous when they go boom. But during normal used such as filling your guns, or using for diving and breathing, they are really safe to use and have built in safety in case you over fill. Unless you are throwing it into a fire or dropping from 10 stories building. They shouldn't go boom on you. Here is a video of how strong a cf tank for paintball. It can withstand a 45 cal from an Texan airforce even when it's fill with 3500psi. I would think a 45 cal 400-500 ft lb gun would at least go through the first layer but it just bounce off the tank like it was hit by a bb gun lol.



http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3_El-4k7xds
 
There's certainly a lot of energy contained in those tanks and they should be treated with a great deal of respect. Its educational to see what happens when they do explode so that we don t try it ourselves. I would like to know, however, what the factor of safety is designed into them, and what the burst pressure is. We're told that they are good for 15 years, but realistically, the number of fill cycles would be a better way of limiting life.
 
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So, as an engineer, I'm a HUGE fan of destructive testing. Finding out the failure mode of things is a critical part of building something dangerous, and HPA tanks definitely are very very dangerous. So taking a couple shot at HPA air tanks with a representative airgun (or paintball gun) isn't necessarily a crazy thing to do because, when you're on the range, accidents are very much are a possibility and one errant shot could create a hand grenade. 


That said, this test was done in a pretty astonishingly unsafe manner. Aside from the distance being way too close, the cords obviously not being strong enough, a lack of a protective barrier/remote actuation, and the obvious fact that he was nearly hit by one which rolled right past him, he had no way to safety the system after the test. Yes, if you're going to do destructive/penetrative testing on a system like that it needs to be fully pressurized, however you need a way to safely and remotely de-pressurize the tanks afterward. Precisely what you should NOT do is then "walk up to it to see what happened." 75 yards with nothing in between is a pretty pitiful safety measure, but even still that is vastly better than walking right next to a violated HPA tank. 

So yeah, free country and I hate to be a safety sally here, but this was a really bad plan on several different levels. Similar goes for stringing them together, because now all three are in an "unsafe" condition needing to be vented and without any sort of remote monitoring equipment you have no idea if that has occurred and the test range is safe. 


I should also add that bomb ranges exist for a very important reason, and are one of just a handful of appropriate places to test such a thing. 
 
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"We're told that they are good for 15 years, but realistically, the number of fill cycles would be a better way of limiting life."







Carbon fiber unlike metals don't fatigue from cycling. When we (BASF materials) were first trying to develop a carbon fiber MTB handle bar back in the 90's they took one and installed it on a test machine (might have been a MTS) that cycled the bars up and down. The machine broke after about 1,000,000 cycles and the bars were still in great shape. 
 
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So, as an engineer, I'm a HUGE fan of destructive testing. Finding out the failure mode of things is a critical part of building something dangerous, and HPA tanks definitely are very very dangerous. So taking a couple shot at HPA air tanks with a representative airgun (or paintball gun) isn't necessarily a crazy thing to do because, when you're on the range, accidents are very much are a possibility and one errant shot could create a hand grenade. 


That said, this test was done in a pretty astonishingly unsafe manner. Aside from the distance being way too close, the cords obviously not being strong enough, a lack of a protective barrier/remote actuation, and the obvious fact that he was nearly hit by one which rolled right past him, he had no way to safety the system after the test. Yes, if you're going to do destructive/penetrative testing on a system like that it needs to be fully pressurized, however you need a way to safely and remotely de-pressurize the tanks afterward. Precisely what you should NOT do is then "walk up to it to see what happened." 75 yards with nothing in between is a pretty pitiful safety measure, but even still that is vastly better than walking right next to a violated HPA tank. 

So yeah, free country and I hate to be a safety sally here, but this was a really bad plan on several different levels. Similar goes for stringing them together, because now all three are in an "unsafe" condition needing to be vented and without any sort of remote monitoring equipment you have no idea if that has occurred and the test range is safe. 


I should also add that bomb ranges exist for a very important reason, and are one of just a handful of appropriate places to test such a thing.
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Yeah, when I seen him walk up to the bottle he just shot with the texan I'm thinking the same as you. How do you know if that tank isn't getting ready to explode after being impacted. I've seen the kind of damage a 1000 inch pound impact can do to carbon fiber just imagine what the FTLBS of energy he hit that ank with did.
 
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I'm a big fan of .22 plinkers. I don't mind him showing us what would happen to an air tank if shot at. Idk why people crying like babies about it and complaining like what he did was a crime. He isn't promoting you all to go out and shoot one. He is just showing us what will happen. If he was telling you all to go out and shoot your own tanks, that would be a different story. So do you guys cry every time you see myth busters testing out crazy dangerous things to find out what will happen? Jesus lmao
 
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I'm a big fan of .22 plinkers. I don't mind him showing us what would happen to an air tank if shot at. Idk why people crying like babies about it and complaining like what he did was a crime. He isn't promoting you all to go out and shoot one. He is just showing us what will happen. If he was telling you all to go out and shoot your own tanks, that would be a different story. So do you guys cry every time you see myth busters testing out crazy dangerous things to find out what will happen? Jesus lmao
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Agree. I don't know anything about the gentleman or his site but he is showing what can happen. Was it the smartest thing to do, in the way that he did it? Probably not. But it did show what could happen if you were closer than he was.
 
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"We're told that they are good for 15 years, but realistically, the number of fill cycles would be a better way of limiting life."







Carbon fiber unlike metals don't fatigue from cycling. When we (BASF materials) were first trying to develop a carbon fiber MTB handle bar back in the 90's they took one and installed it on a test machine (might have been a MTS) that cycled the bars up and down. The machine broke after about 1,000,000 cycles and the bars were still in great shape.
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I would be more concerned with the aluminum core.
 
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