Destructive Air Tank Testing

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

True, I didn't elaborate on the example nearly far enough. We all like ice cream, and about 4 years ago a few people started buying Company A's no fat vanilla ice cream. They could eat a lot of ice cream and not deal with the negative calories. Company B who had been selling us ice cream for a long time decided to also make a no fat vanilla ice cream. The problem is Company B's no fat vanilla ice cream has manufacturing problems that were quickly discovered and Company B has offered to replace all there no fat vanilla with there full fat vanilla free of charge to anyone that has bought it. Some teams never switched to company B's no fat vanilla they have been going out and buying Company A's ice cream the whole time, and it has never had any problems. Company B has just recently released a no fat chocolate ice cream. The chocolate ice cream so far seems to be pretty good it doesn't seem to have the manufacturing issues that plagued company B's vanilla ice cream. Lately people have been suggesting a ban on all no fat ice cream or at least on all vanilla no fat ice cream when really only one type of vanilla no fat ice cream has been shown to have issues.

You're still missing the point here. Risk analysis looks at two components, likelihood and severity. While you have repeatedly made claims that the likelihood of the failure of a Pneuaire tank is lower, the severity of the risk is the same. Plastics, by their nature, Untreated Polypropelene tend to fail in a brittle fashion. As a result, plastics as a pressure vessel tend to explode when they fail authorities such as the Plastic Pipe Institute and OSHA caution against using thermoplastics as pressure vessels unless they're buried or contained. The severity of a a failure of a pneuaire tank is still very high, as it would create high energy shrapnel.

What the people calling for examining a ban on plastic tanks are concerned about is the severity of the risk, not necessarily the frequency of failures. The argument that the reward of allowing teams to use a plastic tank does not outweigh the total risk factor, which is contrary to the reward of letting teams use tools. That's the argument you have to address, not that pneuaire tanks are less likely to fail.