The new riverside location has direct access to deep water quay facilities enabling quayside mobilisation and vessel load out for larger equipment. Complementing the design, project management and customer support services offered by PCT are manufacturing facilities, including fabrication, shot-blast & painting which are operated on the same site by our strategic partner W D Close & Sons. The combined capabilities enable us to design, manufacture and assemble large equipment, such as carousels of up to 7000t capacity, with all activities taking place on one site.

This expansion of UK based activities comes less than 18 months after establishing subsidiary operations in the USA, PCT Inc, and in China, PCT China Ltd, through which the group has expanded global sales and manufacturing capabilities.

PCT Ltd is a privately owned company based in Newcastle UK with subsidiaries in the USA and China. The company designs and supplies coiling, handling and packaging solutions for flexible products such as plastic pipe, sub-sea umbilical, power cables, flow-lines and steel wire rope.

The stands will form part of a new wire rope closing line which will produce some of the largest wire ropes in the world when it goes into service in 2012.  The state-of-the-art facility that Bridon is building on Tyneside will manufacture some of the largest and most complex ropes in the world, and will further cement the company’s position as a global technology leader.

The innovative stand design allows full drums to be loaded and unloaded either directly from the factory floor or from a transport trailer without the need for an overhead crane.  This ability, combined with a lightweight design, offers significant operational benefits over the traditional style of large take-up stands used in the wire rope sector and was the primary factor behind Bridon’s selection of PCT as supplier on this flagship project.  Bridon’s Colin Pratt commented “We awarded this contract after a rigorous six month tender process, during which PCT clearly demonstrated that their unique and innovative machine solution would meet Bridon’s operational requirements.”

The contract award is a testament to the technical innovation of the PCT design team and the proven ability of the company to deliver high quality, bespoke engineering solutions to global industry leaders in manufacturing sectors such as wire rope, sub-sea umbilical, power cable and flow-lines.

One of the first machines to be manufactured by PCT Inc was also the first coiling machine in the USA to be equipped with PCT’s Low Ovality Technology System. LV Technology significantly reduces the out of roundness of coiled polyethylene pipe and is able to coil pipe diameters of up to 8” with less than 5% ovality occurring. The coiler was also fitted with an automatic strapping system which reduces operator involvement in the coil production cycle, improving coiling efficiency and operator safety.  Completed coils, weighing up to 5,500lbs, are safely removed from the coiler using an integrated unload jib which places coils onto a cradle or onto a forklift truck. Low Ovality coiling machinery has been established in the European plastic pipe industry for many years and is regarded by many as essential equipment for the production of large bore HDPE pipe.

Low Ovality Technology (LV™) from Pipe Coil Technology Ltd has been used in Europe for some time now to provide a stable platform for HDPE and MDPE pipe in coil form. Users of LV promote and supply coils with less than 5% ovality in the 90mm to 180mm OD range, eliminating kinking failures and the need for further pre-installation manipulation on site. LV can also provide longer continuous coils by starting the coils at a smaller ID. With new ploughing technologies and the need for longer continuous lengths and larger diameters in coil form, a new technology was waiting to be introduced to remove the backlog of butt welding constraints and failures caused by contamination and poor practises.

4600m of DN160 or 800m of DN315 on a reel, sounds implausible outside of the offshore oil and gas industry. At Pipe Coil Technology Ltd we are used to dealing with these sorts of lengths having years of handling and development experience for the off-shore umbilical industry. In marrying two areas of our expertise we can provide equipment to coil and store these example unit lengths at the manufacturing point, transport them and dispense them at the installation site for gas gathering, mining slurry lines and major irrigation projects.

Combining trenchless ploughing-in techniques with our LV reeling technology the installation cost savings can be orders of magnitude. Ploughs of this type are capable of simultaneous burying of 2 x DN315 pipes. Reeled pipe feeds also assist by direct in-line pay-off whilst the ploughing occurs so there are no long pre-strung lengths sat in the extremes of ambient temperature. The obvious savings occur with minimal or zero butt welding teams having to make clinical environment joints in these extreme conditions. The larger sizes above DN180 require LV and straightening on site but this does not slow the ploughing-in speeds, only providing a final manipulation to ensure ease of installation. Branch and distribution line installations also benefit from LV technology in its original free standing coil formats that can be utilised in urban areas.

Complementary processes further enhance and exploit the overall effectiveness of longer continuous pipe lengths. A partner company has patented portable extrusion line technology that operates from linked container sized units to provide a localised pipe production base feeding pipe in reel or coil sizes normally considered too large for un-escorted highway transportation. Rehabilitation projects using Swagelining™ or Slip lining can also be enhanced by removing the need to string out long butt welded lengths which require de-beading, sometimes both internally and externally.