For industrial mining applications, only plastic pipes with diameters above 800 mm are used. The main focus is on extracting crude oil, natural gas and metal ores. Iron ore for steel production and copper ore for the electrical and communication industries are of special interest.
Formerly, steel pipes were used as transport systems in mines. While these have a longer service life than plastic pipes, they also have definite disadvantages, such as the noise level generated by transporting slurry (a mixture of crushed ore and water) and the contamination of the slurry by the unavoidable abrasion of the steel (up to 20% of the pipes’ wall thicknesses). Therefore, thick-walled, large diameter PE 100 pipes are used today.
Plastic pipes are also in use in oil production and in fracking for natural gas exploitation, as well as for other industrial applications like the cooling of PE cracking plants.
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