Underwater pipe and pile cutter - GIF

[Altair]

Underwater pipe and pile cutter.




Previously:

Underwater arc cutting - GIF
1907 iron dive suit - photo
Underwater digging water jet - GIF
Giant underwater claw lifting device - video
Underwater power tools - GIF
Underwater chainsaw - video

[nova_robotics]

How does it get there? This is just the cutter attached to a much bigger system. What holds this cutter?

[mwmkravchenko]

I can think of so many things to go wrong with this idea. How about jamming for one.

[nova_robotics]

I can think of so many things to go wrong with this idea. How about jamming for one.

Exactly. Like 1" from the edge. Every. Single. Time. I'm sure there's a reason that the sample video is being cut vertically.

[Frank S]

Diver in the water. With the proper guards I would have welcomed one of those things. Having used an underwater cutting torch using hydrogen & oxygen with compressed air to create an air bubble to protect the flame, a sudden current could force you to move the torch at the wrong time changing the angle you were holding it moving you off your cut or worst yet cause you to lose the air bubble extinguishing the flame. You would know it immediately by the concussion of the flame making a boom as it went out. making you surface to relight it. lighting it under water was not a good option as the boom from the hydrogen oxygen and compressed air could bust your ear drums.
Another bad thing is it is almost impossible to even see the flame when burning hydrogen. At least if you were cutting at a depth of 10 feet or less you could use acetylene

[MeJasonT]

What have I never mentioned ROVs,
You know I built one, ok I can hear you all yawning.

Yep these vehicles are the subsea vehicle of choice, just like divers they are hard maintenance and still complain but at least with divers on board the fridge is full of ice creams/cans of goffas and the fruit bowls are full of bananas. Energy food you undrstand. Not for ROV operators, yeah right.

[MeJasonT]

Frank

what was that explosive cord, that used to make easy work of stuff. That and blowing the thing up.
worked on a couple of projects where we removed old well structures with explosives, putting them in place with the ROV.
sounds like fun but the vessel moved off 6 miles, where is the fun in that - we hardly saw or heard anything.

On a side note the Berirut explosion, bloody hell. I have seen some big bangs in my time but holy crap (i do intentionally say that with biblical reference) that was like Hiroshima. Which again is also especially significant as we have just had VJ day.

[MeJasonT]

Risers, the product tube extending from the seabed tend to be vertical, you can get jumpers which link well heads and manifolds which will be horizontal but they tend to be dissasembled the same way they were constructed when they were installed.
Risers are basically a tube inside tube (to use the propper term - pipe) a well will be drilled to a depth of say 50m at 26" diameter and a casing installed. cement will be pumped into the casing forcing the cement up the outside and bonding it into the hole. A new hole is drilled down the inside of the casing say 20" it is then also pumped with cement which again fills the gap between the casings. However the second casing might be 100m long. This operation is carried out 3 or 4 times ending up with a 10" hole/pipe 300m long. punching through is when the drill bit extends beyond the casings and into the well. The demonstration is a little bit of poetic licence, as you can see there would be quite a mass of steel to cut through. Id suspect that this equipment would have been deployed in the Gulf of Mexico cleanup and Deepwater Horizon especially. They work pretty well, its just a miniture version of Smit's big saw they used to cut up and recover the Costa Concordia.







And what it really looks like - in clear water obviously



Smit are the boys, there expertise and sheer size of recovery is unbeleivable, they are taking heavy lift cranes to sea which would dwarf most land based cranes. The sea is not exactly a stable work platform and tends to be a bit spongy when you push weight down on it.

[Frank S]

Frank

what was that explosive cord, that used to make easy work of stuff. That and blowing the thing up.
worked on a couple of projects where we removed old well structures with explosives, putting them in place with the ROV.
sounds like fun but the vessel moved off 6 miles, where is the fun in that - we hardly saw or heard anything.

On a side note the Berirut explosion, bloody hell. I have seen some big bangs in my time but holy crap (i do intentionally say that with biblical reference) that was like Hiroshima. Which again is also especially significant as we have just had VJ day.

its called det.cord or primer cord. it is a plastic tube filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN, pentrite).

[MeJasonT]

det cord thats the one. cordite

Apparently it was used to deliberately bring down the twin towers acording to cospiracy theorists.
one civil engineer made a film using slowmo footage of the tower collapse showing sequential minor detinations.

The super heated aluminium hitting water idea works for me to a certaing point - yes i have welded a few end mills in Alu.

This then takes my mind to the next snippet , ok its steering away from subsea tooling for a second

The scary bit is we have a section of a 747 in the science museum in London its 2 rings of the body about 10 inches apart with a criss crossing diaganal spar section.
you could snap this stuff with your hands - It is no suprise that the planes didnt make it all the way through the towers.

This isnt the london section but




just to put it into perspective this is a plane taking off at heathrow



and things like this should never happen



Lockerbie is only 15 miles from my home, I was about 3 miles from this site (on the A74) on the night offering assistance with my then employer. he used to install car phones and they were desperate for establishing communications during the incident.

There is a strange detail about the incident, one of the passengers died by drowning, dispite being in an explosion and falling hundreds of feet the cause of death was noted as drowning - they had ended up in a peat bog and drowned.