Page 55: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Nov/Dec 2014)

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Pipelines

Siemens Subsea Products’ hydraulic workshop in Norway uses this Unison tube bender for all small-bore tube fabrication.

right- and left-handed bending. This increases manufacturing ef? ciency by subsea tieback to a central processing plat- with accuracies to within fractions of a now typically about 0.5m per week.

allowing tubes up to 6m in length with form in the North Belut gas ? eld. Each millimeter. This programmability and Siemens Subsea Products now pro- multiple complex precision bends to be tube is manufactured from 316 stainless repeatability are key to Siemens Subsea duces all its tube parts in-house. Instead produced in one continuous machine steel and required as many as six com- Products’ manufacturing strategy. Instead of requiring ? ve people with specialist cycle. Previously, manual bending plex bends, followed by orbital welding of using drawings to convey require- fabrication skills to produce 40% of the required repeatedly inserting each tube at both ends. There were eight different ments for manual tube bending, the tubes that it needs, it now takes just one into various forming dies and required a tube con? gurations, and all 800 were company now designs every tube on machine operator to satisfy all produc- minimum space between bends of 20mm produced to exactly the right dimensions, an Inventor 3D computer aided design tion requirements. Automating the bend- to allow for clamping; this is reduced with no wastage. The next major use of system that is networked to the bending ing process has also reduced production to just 5mm on the bending machine, the bending machine was producing tubes machine. After producing a prototype costs. Siemens originally estimated a allowing Siemens to create parts that are for cobra heads destined for the Greater and verifying its accuracy, any necessary machine payback period of slightly less optimized for space-constrained applica- Plutonio project in offshore Angola, where corrections are fed back into the process than two years – in itself a good ? gure tions much more easily. the equipment will be used at depths of to ensure that all subsequent parts are – based on a typical £100/part cost for

Storm Trosdahl, Product Specialist 1600m. manufactured to the same consistent third-party bending. The machine has for hydraulic distribution systems at All critical movement axes on the quality. This has resulted in a signi? cant paid for itself in half this time.

Over the past year, Siemens Subsea

Siemens Subsea Products, says: “For Unison tube bender are driven by reduction in expensive material scrap;

Products has also produced hydraulic ? y- applications such as our cobra heads, software-controlled servomotors, provid- with manual bending, the company was ing leads for a number of smaller projects, where we are packing up to 13 hydraulic ing fully automated set-up, that allows losing about 6m of tube per week to trial such as Ithaca Energy’s Stella oil ? eld in the lines in a very con? ned space, we neces- fast and repeatable fabrication of parts parts and production errors – the ? gure is

North Sea, which is currently under devel- sarily have to use some small radii tube opment, as well as undertaking specialist bends, with precision control over the tube bending work for several third-party bending process to avoid stressing the subsea equipment manufacturers. material. This was dif? cult to achieve manually, but the Unison machine allows us to apply constant torque throughout Steve Haddrell has the bending process, while also control- served as key ling the rate of bending. This makes it accounts manager for easy to control the resultant changes in Unison since 2009. the material. Also, of course, it has suf- Prior to that, he was ? cient torque to handle all our require- UK branch manager ments, including bending tubes made for the Optonics from Inconel (a type of alloy) – which we division of machine previously always had to contract out.” tool manufacturer Yamazaki Mazak.

The ? rst project to use the machine was Hadrell has also worked in senior sales the production of 800 tubes for hydraulic management and technical support roles ? ying leads intended for deployment in for a number of other machine tool

Indonesia’s South Belut gas ? eld in the manufacturers, including Kerf The tube bending machine undergoing ? nal commissioning checks at Unison’s UK

South Natuna Sea, involving an eight-well Developments and the 600 Group.

manufacturing facility, prior to shipment.

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