First, something of an introduction:
I’m a degreed mechanical engineer (UNO, 80 and 84) with mucho electrical engineering courses who specializes in the design of high performance underwater equipment. In the course of doing this I use SolidWorks MCAD software to design the equipment, Nastran from Noran Engineering to analyze the equipment, LabVIEW from National Instruments to control the equipment and IntelliCAD to layout out hydraulic and electric schematics to operate the equipment. I’ve been doing this since the mid-eighties so I hopefully I’m pretty good at it by now!
RM-300
Things at PCS have been rather slow, but luckily I’ve kept busy until the last week or so:
Over the summer of 2004, I helped the principles at Ocean Dynamics rewrite the control software for the RM-300, which is a large cable spool handling machine.
This thing is enormous and is the largest piece of equipment I’ve ever written code to control. All the software was developed inLabVIEW v7.0 from National Instruments. It had been a while since I had done any coding in LabVIEW, but the visual nature of LabVIEW allowed me to effectively jump right back in. You can see more pictures here.
EMD
In the fall PCS decided to develop a tool to accurately measure the inside and outside diameter of pipe and collect the data for analysis of the optimum line up condition of pipe ends for welding. I designed and assembled tools for both 10″ pipe and 16″ pipe. The tools use lasers to measure the pipe and the data is relayed through interface boards from www.rs485.com to a Symbol Palm Pilot hand held computer.
The tools take measurements at 16 discrete points around the periphery of the pipe and a data analysis routine was written to properly line up the pipe ends for welding. There seems to be some interest in taking data at many more points, but nothing concrete has been defined as yet.
Al Tortorich at New Orleans Machine and Fabrication did the machine work, and all the mechanical and electronic assembly was done by yours truly. I’ll post some pictures of the actual tools forthwith.
T D Williamson
As I mentioned on the front page, I’ve been commuting from my home in Slidell, LA to Houston, TX every week to assist in the development of some pipeline tools for the offshore services division of TD Williamson. I’ve been designing some extremely small hydraulic control systems for actuation of the pipeline tools. I can’t tell you a lot more as I am under NDA, but it’s been fascinating and a challenging project.
That’s about all I have to talk about. More later….