FORMIDABLE FIREPOWER
Sink or Swim: This advanced tube bender provides versatile on-demand production for submarine building, with fast single-stage fabrication of complex part shapes that suit the dynamic nature of this production environment.
Posted: November 12, 2008
A state-of-the-art tube bending machine is giving BAE Systems Submarine Solutions (Barrow-in-Furness, UK) greater flexibility to fabricate complex part shapes required to build the UK's Astute class nuclear-powered submarines.
Supplied by Unison (Scarborough, UK), the all-electric tube bender features both right and left handed bending capability. This allows long and complicated tubular part shapes to be produced very rapidly and in a single stage. For BAE Systems, this is a critical advantage as the boat building process must run to plan and many parts are produced to demand to satisfy the production schedule.
In some cases, such as when fabricating tubular shapes of several meters in length, the new machine also allows BAE Systems to make parts from a single length of tubing, avoiding any need to join tube sections. In addition to production speed advantages, this new capability also eliminates time-consuming and expensive X-ray and crack-detection testing stages that would otherwise be required to verify the integrity of welded joints for this high-reliability equipment.
The new 20 mm machine was purchased to increase the production capacity and flexibility of the pipe shop at the company's Barrow-in-Furness shipyard. It joins a number of hydraulic tube bending machines. As well as being the first right and left handed machine, the new equipment is also the shipbuilder's first 'all-electric' tube bender with position control achieved via servomotor-based movement axes.
A NEW GENERATION OF SUBMARINE
The Astute Class submarine is a next-generation nuclear-powered submarine that will be the largest and most able attack submarine that the Royal Navy has operated, with a performance to rival any in the world. The 1998 Strategic Defense Review reaffirmed the UK's need for submarines – but with increasingly flexible capabilities.
Astute's role as an undersea hunter-killer relies on her being stealthier than her underwater environment. Astute will undertake a range of tasks including intelligence gathering, support for land forces and anti-submarine warfare.
Designed to operate in isolation or as part of a joint military task force with other naval vessels, aircraft and land forces, Astute's challenge is to remain undetected, thousands of miles from home and hundreds of meters underwater while still being able to communicate securely and effectively with allied forces via satellite. Astute has greater weapons capability, improved communications facilities and enhanced capability to operate in the littoral in comparison with the existing Swiftsure and Trafalgar (S&T) Class in service at present.
A powerful threat to enemy ships and submarines, Astute also has formidable firepower against land targets. Armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles she can strike at targets up to 1,000 km from the coast with pin-point accuracy.
Fabricating highly complex tubular shapes is an everyday task for the pipe shop. In order to fit in all of the submarine's equipment, and maximize the free space available, small-bore piping and tubing services such as hydraulic lines are often shaped to fit into the free spaces available adjacent to panels and bulkheads. Consequently, tubular parts are often fabricated in batch sizes of just one.
The tube bender is making it quicker to produce components, as programs are simply loaded from the design database, and bends are then made precisely by the servomotor movement axes with their closed-loop control mechanisms. No manual intervention or adjustments of any kind are required. If the tooling is already on the machine, the set up operation is achieved in around 15 minutes or less. This is typically at least twice as fast as the set up process for the company's hydraulic bending machines.
A power consumption reduction is another intrinsic advantage of the bender. As there are no hydraulic pumps continuously running, significant electrical current is only drawn when the machine is making a bend, so energy consumption is reduced substantially.
BAE Systems chose this machine because of the OEM's reputation for pioneering the all-electric concept and producing machines for some of the world's most demanding applications, including naval shipbuilders and aerospace companies — but also for its UK location. Failure to produce parts on schedule could lead to production delays, and the risk of having a machine out of service for an extended period is unacceptable to BAE System's pipe shop.
BUILDING A HERITAGE
BAE Systems is an international company engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defense and aerospace systems in the air, on land, at sea and in space. The company designs, manufactures and supports military aircraft, surface ships, submarines, fighting vehicles, radar, avionics, communications, electronics and guided weapon systems.
BAE Systems is a pioneer in technology with a heritage stretching back hundreds of years. It remains at the forefront of innovation, working to develop the next generation of intelligent defense systems. The company has major operations across five continents and customers in some 130 countries. The company employs more than 100,000 people and sales exceeded £15.7 billion in 2007.
The decision makers were happy about the proximity of Unison's headquarters in the UK, which allows an engineer to make a service call within hours of a problem emerging. Another useful aspect of the machine is its incorporation of sophisticated software-based facilities that can be used for fault diagnosis. These include a camera that can be used to capture images or video of any operational problems. In combination with a software 'black box' which automatically stores the last 500 instructions entered by the operator, along with details of machinery positions from the servo motor sensors, Unison have detailed information to provide remote maintenance advice.
The Astute program is the most demanding engineering project currently under way in the UK and the nuclear powered attack submarine has been described as 'more complex than the space shuttle', involving nuclear weapons and stealth technology operating in the most hazardous environment on the planet. An Astute class submarine has a million individual components and 10,000 separate design and engineering requirements.
"We are driven by a demanding production schedule," says Kevin Johnston, the Integrated Work Team Manager at BAE Systems Submarine Solutions. "The versatility of an all-electric tube bender – one capable of making both right and left handed bends – is a major asset for my department and will help us to keep major shipbuilding projects such as Astute running smoothly."
"Naval shipbuilding is possibly the most demanding application there is for tube bending machinery," adds Alan Pickering of Unison. "A constant stream of application-specific parts are required, and typically need to be produced just-in-time as work progresses along the vessel. The software-centric nature of all-electric tube bending machines with their attributes of fast and accurate set-up, and ultra-precise bending, provides versatile automation to support this highly dynamic work environment."
To save space, the new tube bender incorporates on-machine guard panels. This feature will additionally simplify moving the machine if required, for any reorganization of the shipyard required for subsequent construction projects such as the UK's 'Future Aircraft Carriers'.
Unison, Olympian Trading Est., Cayton Low Road, Scarborough, YO11 3BT, UK, +44( 0) 1723 582868, www.unisonltd.com.
Horn Machine Tools, 40473 Brickyard Drive, Madera, CA 93638, 559-431-4131; Fax: 559-431-4431, www.hornmachinetools.com.
BAE Systems Submarine Solutions, 1st Floor, Main Shipyard Offices, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, LA14 1AF, United Kingdom, +44 (0) 1229 823366; Fax: +44 (0) 1229 874000, www.baesystems.com.
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