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EN 13480 is a European series of standards for metallic industrial piping, covering materials, design and calculation, fabrication, inspection and testing.
EN 13480 is titled “Metallic industrial piping”. The series describes how above-ground, ducted and buried piping made of metallic materials is designed, fabricated, installed and tested. National editions carry the prefix of the standards body, for example BS EN 13480 or DIN EN 13480.
It is the European counterpart to ASME B31.3 – with its own structure, its own material values and its own stress limits.
Piping placed on the market in the European Union as pressure equipment has to meet the essential safety requirements of the Pressure Equipment Directive 2014/68/EU. EN 13480 is a harmonised standard for this purpose: applying it gives a presumption that the requirements of the directive it covers are met.
The directive assigns piping to categories according to fluid, nominal size and pressure. The category determines which conformity assessment procedure applies and whether a notified body is involved. Below the thresholds, sound engineering practice is sufficient – without CE marking.
Part 3 is the part designers work with most. It contains the wall thickness calculation for straight pipe, bends, reducers and branches under internal and external pressure, the rules for flanged joints and the flexibility analysis – what is called pipe stress analysis in practice.
For the flexibility analysis the standard distinguishes between stresses from sustained loads, from occasional loads and from restrained thermal expansion and sets a separate limit for each group. A further clause deals with supports.
EN 13480-3 derives the allowable stress from the strength values in the material standard. For non-austenitic steels in the time-independent range the design stress is the lower of the elevated-temperature yield strength divided by 1.5 and the tensile strength divided by 2.4. Separate rules apply to austenitic steels and to the creep range.
Weld quality enters through the joint coefficient z, which depends on the extent of testing.
A piping class to EN 13480 specifies which pipes, fittings, flanges and gaskets are used for a range of pressure and temperature. The standard supplies the calculation rules; the components themselves come from the European product standards for pipes, fittings and flanges. Which edition of the standard applies is agreed in the project.
What Entracon offers here is on the matching page.
See what we offer| Part | Content |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | General |
| Part 2 | Materials |
| Part 3 | Design and calculation |
| Part 4 | Fabrication and installation |
| Part 5 | Inspection and testing |
| Part 6 | Additional requirements for buried piping |
| Part 8 | Additional requirements for aluminium and aluminium alloy piping |
No. What is binding is the Pressure Equipment Directive; the standard is one way of meeting its requirements. Other codes are possible, but the manufacturer then has to demonstrate compliance with the directive independently.
Both cover the same ground but derive allowable stresses differently and use different factors, examination rules and test pressures. A design is carried out entirely to one of them.
The standard requires adequate flexibility to be demonstrated but permits routes of differing effort depending on the line – from comparison with proven systems to a full calculation. Temperature, nominal size and connected equipment are decisive.
No, the series deals with metallic materials. Separate standards and guidelines apply to plastic piping.
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Start typing – for example “balancer”, “SAP” or “pipe stress”.
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