Military shipbuilding company, Huntington Ingalls Industries (NYSE:HII), wanted to increase the efficiency of its tube bending facility at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
Having already benefited by moving from hydraulic tube bending machines to Unison Ltd’s ultra-precise, all-electric tube bending technologies, HII looked to Unison to develop a single-stack pipe bender for its latest challenge: bending pipe up to a nominal diameter of 8 inches with Schedule 40 wall thicknesses of over 8 mm (with an outside diameter of 8.65 inches/ approximately 220 mm).
Even though Unison machines are globally regarded for their robust build quality, Unison still had to overcome considerable engineering challenges to design this brute of a pipe bender. Unison’s Research & Development team worked on the concept for more than a year to create a machine that offered an advanced, highly productive and precise alternative to the hydraulic machines that are typically used for bending large-diameter tubing and piping.
With all-electric architecture, advanced software and closed-loop servomotor axes, Unison’s solution, affectionally nicknamed ‘Big Dave’ provides automatic machine setup, with high accuracy and repeatability from batch to batch.
Huntington Ingalls Industries can achieve right-first-time bending of tubes and pipes of up to 8 inches/220 mm in diameter. Moreover, Unison’s incredible 220 mm single-stack machine has since been widely adopted across the shipyard, oil & gas and energy industries, with an even larger 273 mm maximum tube diameter model also being built for an oil & gas customer.
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