We offer load testing for companies needing to determine load carrying capabilities of equipment, components, parts, and structure.
This capability supports our on-site mechanical delivery teams and offers significant benefits to our customers’ overall project delivery. Utilizing off-site fabrication enhances health and safety performance, productivity, programmed certainty and commercial delivery.
The installation of pipe systems follows its fabrication and is very frequently a part of it. The installation of pipe can be accomplished in the following two primary ways, or combinations thereof:
Some contractors prefer to do most, if not all fabrication in the shop, others prefer to set up at the job-site, while others are flexible enough to utilize the best of both methods.
Field fabrication and installation is exactly what it means. The pipe is fabricated on-site, either directly at the place where it is mounted, or in a temporary accommodation in the field.
A number of factors will determine whether it is profitable to fabricate pipe on site:
Type of project, size and scope of the project, pipe size and material, accessibility of the equipment, surface treatment after fabrication, weather conditions, availability of qualified personnel, time available to do the job, etc..
Fabrication is, generally speaking, any pipe, fittings and components that are assembled by welding into spool assemblies at the fabricator’s facility. The spools are then labeled with an identifier and transported to the job site for installation.
Each spool piece needs its own identifier marked on the piece itself in some fashion that will make it easy to know where its destination is in the facility and/or where it belongs in a multi-spool system of pipe. This will allow the installer to efficiently stage the piece and ready it for installation.
As part of the process of developing spool sections field-welded joints need to be designated. These are welded joints that connect the pre-fabricated spools. In doing this the designer or fabricator will identify two different types of field-welded joints.
One is a Field Weld (FW) and the other is a Field Closure Weld (FCW). The FW indicates a joint in which the end of a pipe segment is prepared for the installer to set in place and weld to its connecting joint without additional modification in the field. This means that the length of pipe that is joined to another in the field is cut precisely to length and the end prepared in the shop for welding.
The FCW provides the installer with an additional length of pipe, usually 100 to 150 mm longer than what is indicated on the design drawings, to allow for field adjustment.What has to be considered, and what prompts the need for a FCW, is the actual, as-installed, location of both the fixed equipment that the pipe assemblies may connect to and the actual installed location of the pipe assembly itself. Odds are that all equipment and piping will not be installed exactly where indicated on design drawings.
The dimensional location of the equipment items given on design drawings is not a finite location, they are merely intended locations, as are drawings for building steel, pipe supports and others. What factors into the installation of shop fabricated pipe is the actual location of the equipment nozzle it will be connecting to in relation to the pipe’s installed location.