Accelerate your craftsmanship with the robotic pipe shop, a unique piece of shipyard automation. With integrated pipe storage and flange mounting robots, it diminishes the time per spool from multiple hours, to only a few minutes.
The production of pipe spools is a complex and time consuming process. KRANENDONK offers a robotic pipe shop that fully automates pipe spool fabrication. The system can be equipped with buffers, an intelligent high-rise storage, saw, grinding and marking tool. The production flow is changed by welding flanges before bending. In this way, production time is reduced to minutes instead of hours per pipe. All production tasks are automated and centrally controlled. As a result, no manual programming is needed. This makes the system highly flexible and capable of handling continuously changing designs.
The flange assembly cell consists of four robots with vision technology. These robots automatically perform picking, placing, tack welding and final welding of flanges to different tube sizes. Vision technology is able to recognize both flange and tube location to ensure automatic and smooth assembly in the correct orientation. It recognizes size, center point and bolting holes. With a precision of 0.3 millimetres the flanges are placed onto the tubes. After the tack welding, the four robots simultaneously weld the inner and outer side of the flange to the pipe.
By automating the fabrication of pipe spools, production time goes from several man-hours to 4 minutes. Production cost per pipe pool is drastically reduced.
All connected systems are centrally controlled, using logistics software, resulting in a highly efficient production flow. Each tube is monitored individually by the central control system.
Robots automatically follow the weld seam with high precision and adapt to unroundness. The end result are consistent welds without the need for rework.
With intelligent software and vision technology, the system can handle continuously changing designs. Pipes are produced on demand, in any order.
Logistics software coordinates all production tasks, so no manual programming is needed. This results in high productivity and large cost savings in the pipe shop.