The launch event, held in mid- November, saw the great and the good of the offshore industry attend along with government representatives and national press. Bridon did not waste the opportunity.
The occasion was marked by the switching-on of the factory’s rope-closing machine, the largest of its kind provided by manufacturer SKET. Constructed to a unique specification by the German engineering company, the machine will allow the company to produce far more complex ropes than had ever previously been possible with such weights. Pulling the lever to activate the machine was UK Business Minister Michael Fallon, who praised Bridon for establishing a global technology leadership position through its consistent investment in innovation.
Whereas in the past the upper weight limit for Bridon wire ropes was 350t, when manufactured in Germany, and only 140t in the UK, the new facility will have the capacity to produce highly engineered 600t ropes. The company claims that new products will have enhanced breaking loads, optimised bend fatigue performance, effective lubrication and exhibit minimal rotation under load.
Bridon group technical director, Chris Newton, says: "We’ve made rotation resistant rope for a long time, but as you can imagine when you get to bigger diameters you have to use modeling and engineering to keep those levels of rotation at low values, because they become more significant as you go to bigger loads and bigger ropes.
"We are going to use the 24 bobbins on the closer in a carefully engineered way to lay down multiple strands. So for example our typical product may have 34 strands but we might move to 44 strands or 60 strands to be able to reduce the level of rotation to almost zero, in the case of the 60 strand.
"Our new machine has 24 bobbins. There are two sections, one with 16 bobbins and one with eight bobbins, a front and a rear section that can be operated independently. We also have a very novel technology for take-up from the closer that allows us to move the product directly to the quayside."
Accompanying Bridon Chief Executive Jon Templeman at the event were a host of senior industry figures including Certex CEO Peter Keith and NOV Cranes Division Head Oddvar Hoydal, who noted how Bridon’s highly engineered ropes could improve their companies’ heavy lifting and deepwater deployment capabilities.
Speaking to Hoist Magazine, Templeman said: "The ones made on the big machine, which is really what we’ve built Neptune for, they’ll be for lifting ropes. Riser tensioners, oil field lifting, potentially some anchor lines as well, but then on the stranding machine for deepwater moorings, that’s where we’ll make the mooring ropes. The big rope closer itself is really about oilfield lifting."
According to Bridon, the factory’s portside location, along with its state of the art Take-up Stand for lifting reels directly from dock to vessel, will help Bridon to significantly improve logistics. Newton explains the value of the bespoke take-up stand being used at Neptune Quay. "These are of a different order of magnitude in terms of size [compared to take-up stands typically used by wire rope-makers], and they’re fully automated, it’s a unique system."
Templeman adds: "Once [the wire rope] is on it, it can be driven out of the factory on rails, taken to the quayside, and that’s obviously very attractive from the point of having direct access to different forms of shipping or crane systems that can manoeuvre our product to the benefit of the customer to wherever they want to take it. Having a quayside location, it’s one of the main reasons that the Neptune factory was built where it was."
Along with the new capabilities for constructing very large wire ropes for offshore lifting applications, Bridon’s investment has very much been designed to position themselves as a market leader on a number of fronts. Much of the new investment, and not just the site’s location, has been geared towards reduced lead times for customers as well as maintaining a high level of technical competence to ensure customers have access to the right kind of support.
Templeman adds: "From my perspective it is the most sophisticated rope-making machine in the world, and when you combine that with our technical knowledge and innovative new product programme it’s a fairly healthy admixture. We’re also opening a new Bridon Technology Centre here in Doncaster, which will open in February. That’s not just about the building and the kit that we’re putting in, it’s also using our experience and we’re building our technical capability.
"In addition to that, in order to support the factory in the new factory in Newcastle, we’ve invested in a state-ofthe- art wire drawing machine here in Doncaster that was close on GBP 2M, so that we get the highest quality, and also efficient speed, wire sent up to Neptune Quay. So it isn’t just the new factory, it’s also the support structure around it."
With significant wire rope testing capability in-house to assist in product development Bridon is keen to broaden its presence in several markets. "Most of the ropes that we sell are exported," says Templeman. "We sell a fair amount into the North Sea through Aberdeen, but that apart by far the large majority of our ropes are exported.
"For oil and gas, the big areas for us are the North Sea in its widest sense, so the UK and Norwegian continental shelf and the gulf of Mexico. Also increasingly Brazil and West Africa. For mining its Russia, South Africa, Australia, North America and increasingly now South America. For industrial products, so industrial crane ropes for example, we sell those pretty well all over the world.
"We’ve got two rope factories now, both based in Newcastle, and between them they’ll have about 43,000 of rope capacity, and then Neptune Quay on top. It actually adds 9,000t of rope but also 4,000t of strand for deepwater mooring ropes. Bridon says the new machine will allow the company to get a head start on a number of companies competing in the ultra-deepwater lifting market, a lucrative market growing rapidly.
Newton says: "If you look at the depth that people are going to now, so far I think the largest rope is about 400t and there’s only been one of those, of our 350 tonner. But we’ve already had enquiries for rope of 550t. So this is really geared at ultra-deep water.
"There aren’t going to be 50 orders of that size every year, you’re only going to get probably half a dozen to ten enquiries but they’ll be big orders.
"Also if you’re fitting out a vessel, you probably don’t want to go to three different manufacturers for all your ropes, you get them from one, so that you bundle the package, so it’s a leader as well, a sales leader."
One other important aspect of Bridon’s product development is extension of it’s Hydra range of products, the third generation of which, Templeman explains, will now be produced at Neptune Quay.
"It isn’t just a question of size, they will also have better properties in terms of resistance to rotation.
So that’s one of the big technical innovations that the versatile machine in Neptune enables us to run through." Newton surmises: "What we want to try to do is extend that up to 180mm in diameter. Currently I would say we can operate up to 140mm, but we want to go up to 180mm using this — and with a variety of targeted rope constructions that will meet the specific needs of the application. The machine is capable of 250mm in diameter.
"But I would say that the Hydra range is the product range that is going to give us in the near-term what we require for meeting the deepwater requirements in offshore applications."
