Over the last few years, our hammer union pressure transducers have proven themselves in the field - making believers out of some of the worlds top oil well service companies. This video explains how we developed such a popular oilfield pressure sensor. Enjoy!
History of APG’s Hammer Union Pressure Transducer
Video Transcript
Narrator: A few years ago, we noticed that some of our customers in the Oil and Gas Industry were having trouble with something we didn’t make yet – the hammer union pressure transducer. We had been building pressure sensors since the 1970s, so we decided to help out.
Doug: We have a lot of customers in the Oil and Gas business, and we became aware that they were having challenges with hammer union [pressure transmitters]. Particularly in terms of lead times.
Elden: Some customers were having some frustrations with long lead times – about 22 to 26 week lead times, and they were getting pretty frustrated.
Narrator: 26 weeks lead times! It was a major problem that we knew we could resolve for them. However, if we were going to build a hammer union pressure transducer, we were going to do it right. So before we got started, we asked a lot of questions. What we found was a little surprising.
Doug: There were just several things that created problems for customers; because we engineered it from the ground up, we solved those problems as we went.
Narrator: We started by tackling some of the obvious problems that competing transducers were having. Some easy fixes that others were overlooking.
Elden: Their housings are so narrow you can’t even get your fingers in. Ours is open enough that you can get your fingers in there nicely. Some of them also had drainage issues. You’ll see on this one [APG's HU pressure sensor] there’s these little scallops here to allow for good drainage.
Narrator: Even with a few small but meaningful improvements, we weren’t done yet. We dug a little deeper and learned that many competitor’s sensors were falling apart during high vibration applications such as Measurement While Drilling.
Doug: Customers were dealing with vibration that was literally destroying pressure sensors. The hammer union [pressure transducers] were just not holding up to the abuse that they were taking.
Elden: We knew that there was a lot of vibration involved, and so there were a lot of iterative processes where we had failures, and looked at what happened, and redesigned and redeveloped to fix those.
Doug: We stepped back and said, “What can we do to solve the problem?” We found a very good way of building the hammer union [pressure transmitter] and today we have an awful lot of customers using the hammer union [pressure sensor] in that configuration with great success.
Narrator: So after a lot of listening to our customers, we were able to build them a hammer union pressure transducer that shipped much faster, was easier to use, and was built to handle the toughest high-vibration applications.
We started with hazardous location certification for North America through CSA, but have since added ATEX certification for acceptance throughout Europe. Today, you can get the hammer union pressure transducer from APG in as little as two weeks.
Contact us today to learn more!
