Things you already knew

"The accumulation of water in the vessel caused severe corrosion ..."

Puhleeze.

Every working compressor tank has water in the bottom all the time, drain or no drain. The drain just keeps it from taking up a significant volume.

But you're wrong , Dick . A well-maintained tank will have very little water in the bottom . Our tanks at work (cabinet shop) all have automatic drains , in addition to dryers between the tank and compressor .

"Very little", eh?

Some liquid will always be there, and the atmosphere is at 100 percent saturation.

So from a corrosion standpoint, draining has no effect. There is always some standing liquid water.

Which always leave some liquid in the tank, and do absolutely nothing to the condensing ambient atmosphere in the tank.

Which has nothing to do with conditions inside the tank itself.

Now, a dryer between the compressor pump and the tank, that could be putting dry air in the tank, which is the only way around this problem.

Don't be ignorant and think that draining a tank has anything to do with corrosion protection. You drain tanks to minimize the buildup of volume displacement.

And I can predict with reasonable certanty, the bottom of my tank will fail first.

Wes

Attach stabilizing fins to it, so that if the bottom falls off, it would rocket upwards instead of at you!!!

So, seeing that it really wouldn't add much to the production costs of a tank, why don't they slosh some epoxy around inside it after manufacture? They line gasoline storage tanks with epoxy to prevent corrosion. It wouldn't be a big deal to have a device that randomly tumbles a rack of clamped-in air tanks to move the stuff around (like the PVC molding technology used to make big plastic water tanks and dumpsters and the like) and then remove the plugs and tap out the hardened epoxy from the pipe ports. If it's stuck good the air won't get behind it and blow it off if the tank is drained.

Dan

Hopefully, the pinhole leak will first appear.

Wes

tanks

Looks like that could have been detected as a problem by whacking the bottom of the tank with a hammer.

Unpressurized, of course.

Dave