PIPE WELDING | MACHINERY
Joint effort: advances in pipe joining technology
Developments in pipe joining include the construction of a huge fish farm, installing pipe to capture methane from landfill sites and new funding for an alternative welding method
Apart from when it is extruded in continuous lengths, it is typical for pipe to be produced in sections and later welded together. Although not a typical pipe-joining application,
Leister says that plastic welding is a critical process in the assembly of “the world’s largest thermoplas- tic construction”. The Marine Donut in Norway is a closed fish
farm. Its internal flow system was designed based on a fish’s natural habitat in rivers and the inflow is cleaned with a UV lamp and Bernoulli filter – which removes solid waste in natural liquids such as sea or river water, or process water with moderate contamination. The Marine Donut is designed to withstand waves and ocean currents. It can be raised and lowered with floating tubing on the top, strut tubing below and vertical ballast tanks. There is a working platform on top of the construction with solar panels for sustainable power generation.
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The sheer size of the Marine Donut – such as its weight of 540 tonnes – presented construction challenges. This included the need for meticulous – and watertight – welding of the ring-shaped main construction made up of individual 1-tonne HDPE components. For this, welding specialist Bluegreen turned to Inter-Supply AS, which distributes Leister products in Norway.
Between 8 and 10 tonnes of welding rod were needed to join the HDPE components – welding a combined distance of 20,000m. To ensure accurate seam quality, Leister’s Weldplast S2 and Weldplast 600 extrusion welders were used. The smaller, lighter Weldplast S2 works well in corners and hard-to-access places. The Weldplast 600 and its large output volume of 6 kg/h is suited to the construction of large polyethylene objects. The Donut has since been transferred around 500 nautical miles to the Romsdal Fjord – where SalMar will use it to grow 200,000 salmon.
Main image: Leister’s kit has been used to weld enormous parts on the Marine Donut
� November/December 2023 | PIPE & PROFILE EXTRUSION 21
IMAGE: BLUEGREEN
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