ES267005A1 - Underwater pipe-line installation - Google Patents

Abstract

Improvements in underwater pipeline facilities, characterized by having a number of motorized boats arranged along a pipeline segment, at points that will be coupling points, separated from each other by intervals that may be different; each of the boats is equipped with a cable wound on a winch, and has at least one heavy block; the operators of each boat pass the end of the cable through a locking apparatus and then through at least a sector of a drum that cooperates with this block before provisionally hooking the said end to a boat; they submerge this heavy block at the bottom, allowing the winch cable to develop, a cable that therefore slides on the drum; after this immersion of the block, they unhook the end of the cable, fix it to a coupling device to the pipeline and, since the mentioned device does not rigidly cooperate with the apparatus, they rigidly fasten this apparatus to the pipeline; they wind the cable on the winch thus pulling in the direction of the bottom of the hooking points of the segment; This immersion proper of the pipeline segment, takes place simultaneously in each boat; the winding speeds are different and coordinated, in order to obtain an elastic line -projection of the pipeline on a vertical plane parallel to its axis- coupled at its coupling points, devoid of all kinds of dangerous efforts, and progressively moved; This coordination can be done by signals and even be programmed and developed automatically; when a hooking point has reached the desired depth, they stretch the cable abruptly releasing a small length thereof, which places the locking device in the working position; as soon as the cable is wrapped, the operators undo the cable tie to the winch, thus releasing the boat, then direct it to a new immersion point, consecutive to the highest immersion point in said segment, where the operation begins again, and so on until the entire pipeline has been submerged in the determined ordinates. At any appropriate time, prior to the pipeline immersion operation, the pipeline had been provided with ballasts, if necessary. (Machine-translation by Google Translate, not legally binding)