CABLES, GLANDS & CONNECTORS
EXPLORING THE SUBSEA CABLE MARKET Dynamic Design
Sales Director, Graham Wilkie of Hydro Group plc, a global design and manufacturer of underwater cables and connectors for subsea, topside and harsh environment applications, details how they have stayed ahead in the rapidly changing subsea cable market.
Thanks to the low oil price, the subsea sector is enduring a challenging period. Operators are being forced to venture into more remote and harsher locations, requiring top tier equipment to meet demanding and dynamic environments.
Systems being deployed require reliable power and communications connections suited to meet these demands. Today, the team at Hydro Group are being asked more and more for increasingly complex composite and physically demanding cable designs, the days have gone when the company was simply asked to provide an underwater electrical connection.
Most subsea cables designed and manufactured at Hydro Group’s Aberdeen, Scotland facility incorporate numerous specialist elements such as fibre optics, twisted pairs, triples or quads, Coaxial, VHF and high frequency RF, components.
As subsea equipment is becoming more complex with data management and collection systems transferring significantly higher volumes of information at faster rates the Transmission Characteristics, Low Loss and Shielding requirements need to be addressed in the design and composition of the cables.
To ensure the performance of the designs, increasing use of complex software modelling and analysis tools are employed. Hydro Group engineers routinely utilise packages such as Comsol multiphysics software to model designs and provide virtual realisation of the cable characteristics under a variety of simulated conditions. Transmission characteristics and
performance are also simulated with the use of Optem software tools.
Hydro Group regularly incorporates stainless steel tubes, rather than PBT tubes, for all Subsea Cable designs incorporating fibre optics.
The benefits of utilising optical fibres contained within stainless steel tubes are primarily two fold:
• The attenuation (signal loss) seen in the fibre due to the compressive forces on the glass is minimised as the stainless steel tube protects from the crushing action of the water pressure on the fibre itself.
• The addition of a hydrogen scavenging/ absorbing gel is used within the St/St Tube to prevent the potential darkening of the optical fibres due to the natural ingression of small amounts of hydrogen which are present in these extreme conditions.
www.hydrogroupplc.com
Left: Graham Wilkie, Sales Director, Hydro Group plc. p38 |
www.sosmagazine.biz | January 2016
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