Improved Gasket Testing

At present, the European Standards EN 1591-1 which is used for the calculation of bolted flanged joints and EN 13555 in which the determination of the required gasket characteristics are defined are under revision. Several studies on gasket testing and on flange calculation have been performed in order to verify the suggested modifications of the standardization working groups. As a result of these studies several optimizations in respect of the testing procedures, the definition of the gasket characteristics and the calculation procedure can be derived. In this paper, additional or modified gasket characteristics such as the stiffness-independent gasket deflection, caused by creep of the gasket material or formulas for the description of the gasket compression curves, are presented. Several tests with diverse gasket materials were performed in order to generate generally admitted procedures to determine these required characteristics which are the basis for the advanced calculation procedure which will be presented in a second paper.