‘Right First Time’ Reduces Scrap Material

The accuracy and throughput capabilities of this tube bender offer major economic benefits to job shops and contract manufacturers working with expensive materials.

Siemens Subsea Products (Erlangen, Germany) chose an all-electric tube bender from Unison Ltd. (Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK) to improve the quality and speed up the production of the small-bore hydraulic tubes it uses on subsea hydraulic flying leads with Multiple Quick Connection (MQC) umbilical termination units, Cobra Heads and associated offshore oil and gas recovery equipment.

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These tubes feature complex bends of extremely high accuracy, and until now the company has either fabricated them manually or bought them in as pre-formed sub-assemblies. Subsea manufactures a wide range of subsea electric, fiber optic and hydraulic power and control systems for offshore oil and gas subsea applications. Its hydraulic workshop at Kongsberg in Norway operates world-class fabrication and assembly processes, producing systems for direct sales and third-party suppliers.

As part of its strategy to expand manufacturing capabilities in this specialist field, the company recently reviewed tube bending automation, starting by comparing the performance of a number of leading hydraulic and all-electric tube bending machines.

According to Terje Barth Andersen, the technical advisor for Subsea, “It was quickly apparent that electric tube benders offer a number of advantages over hydraulic machines, including more accurate and repeatable results, lower energy consumption and lower noise. In the all-electric sector, Unison machines stood out from the competition because they allow us much faster tool changeover. This is important for our business because we produce many of our tubes in very small batch sizes. Another key factor behind our choice was their willingness to develop a machine configuration specifically for our needs.”

The tube bender supplied to the Kongsberg shop is a custom 25 mm model based on the Breeze platform of all-electric machines. The machine was installed in the Kongsberg facility at the end of last year, was commissioned and began operation in January. This custom tube bender incorporates a ‘rise and fall’ pressure die that enables it to perform right- and left-handed bending, which increases manufacturing flexibility and throughput by allowing long and complex parts to be produced from a single length of tubing in one continuous cycle.