Sanitary piping and fittings are generally used in various food, beverage and pharmaceutical companies. These items are designed in such a way that they are easily cleanable. They are either cleaned after dismantling them or cleaning during the process.

Usually, these sanitary replacements parts are corrosion resistant and following are few basic characteristics of these sanitary piping:

• All the sanitary piping will be measured by measuring the outer diameter of the tube. In case, you are holding sanitary fitting in the hand, measure its outside diameter of tube section of the fitting. That will be the correct size.

• You may buy tubing and fittings in sizes which is ranging from ½” to 12”.  Most common sizes are between ½” to 4” and commonly available.

• The wall thickness sizes are between ½” to 3” will be 0.065” i.e. 16 gauge.

• The wall thickness for 4” is 0.083” which is 14 gauges.

• The wall thickness for 6” is 0.109” that is 12 gauges.

• The wall thickness for 10” and 12” will be 0.120”.

• Usually, most of the sanitary fittings can either be 304 or 316L of stainless steel.  Few more noble alloys e.g. AL6XN, Hastelloy and Titanium are available in very limited sizes and quantities.

• Surface finish quality will be categorized by its value of Ra.  Ra will be decided by taking the mean distance between its peaks and valleys of metal surface.

It will normally be measured in micro-inches.  The minimum amount of Ra measurement will be needed to render fitting as “sanitary” will be 32.

Various industries e.g. the biopharmaceutical industry will need tubing to be within the range of 15-20Ra.

• These sanitary fittings may not have any threads, pockets or tight radii.  All the radii of various sanitary elbows are fully standardized.  Radius of any sanitary elbow will be 1 ½ time of the OD of your tube.

Therefore, 1” elbow will have 1 ½” radius, 2” elbow has 3” radius, etc.

• Most prevalent type of sanitary fitting with end connection offerings will be buttweld and also sanitary clamp. Sanitary clamp joint will consist of 2 gender neutral fittings having sanitary gasket placed in between.

They all will head together by using a clamp.  There will be host of various other lesser known type sanitary connection systems that includes John Perry, bevel seat, I Line and also Q Line etc.