Flange Tie-in Tool

Value proposition

The business case for the Flange Tie-in Tool is to replace expensive saturation dive vessel with cost effective ROV support vessels and to replace costly tie-in hubs, PLEMs and PLETs with cost effective diver flanges. The resulting cost savings will be between 100 kEUR – 500 kEUR per connection.

DesignBanken have over the past 6 years developed a range of Flange Tie-in Tool for ROV tie-in of standard diver flanges, and is together with DeepOcean building and testing neutrally buoyant Flange Tie-in tools handling flanges from 6 to 16 inch and special tooling for flanges up to 21 ¼ inch. The Flange Tie-in tool is based on a hydraulic bolt design which is under patent by DesignBanken. Performing tie-in operations of spools or risers with diver flanges by use of ROV tooling will replace divers, and will therefore have significant Health, Safety and Environmental as well as cost saving benefits.

The Flange Tie-in Tool can be configurated to suit any application where diver flanges are used. This can for example be tie-in of a single spool to a wellhead, a riser to a pipeline or a series of spool-to-spool connections. The tool configuration will be made to optimize tool cost versus installation vessel time, a simple tool set up for a one-off connection or an effective tool set-up for multiple connections.

For subsea field developments the manifolds can be fitted with cost effective diver flanges instead of costly hubs for tie-in systems. The Flange Tie-in Tool can then be used for the tie-ins instead of the conventional remote tie-in systems. The use of the Flange Tie-in tool also removes the need for PLEM and PLETs as the pipeline can be placed straight onto the seabed during pipelay.