Splice Quandary

 Dear All-knowing Frog,

My firm’s cable system consists of cable segments with existing hand-taped splices and “Dutchmen” type splices.  Describe how your company would inject cables with both these types of splices and the benefits\cost savings.

Can you help me with my splice quandary?

Al Berta

Dear Al-

You came to the right Frog.  Many circuit owners reflexively think about replacing the entire cable run when a single blocked splice is encountered. Replacement of the entire run is the least capital efficient approach.  To understand why this is so, check out my August 31, 2010 post “Of Splices and Prices.”

Dealing directly with splices is definitely the way to go. Novinium is the only rehabilitation supplier that offers three solutions – a good solution, a better solution, and a best solution.

Good

Traditionally, when blocked splices (or splice pairs a.k.a Dutchmen) are encountered they are excavated and replaced.  They may be replaced with a molded repair splice, where the repair splice length is great enough to span the gap between the two cable ends, or a pair of regular length molded splices together with a length of stranded and non-strand-blocked cable. Hose clamps are included on the molded splices to provide added hoop strength and improve their pressure holding capability.

Better 

Using Novinium’s patented (U.S. Patents 7,615,247, 7,195,504, 7,538,274, 7,683,260, and their non-U.S. equivalents) sustained pressure rejuvenation (SPR) process, splices are replaced with almost any kind of splice and the cable is injected from the splice pit in both directions, back to the next cable end.

Best

Combining the “pros” and eliminating all but one “con” of the good and better splice solutions is the Novinium flow-through splice. Shown in the drawing nearby a simple modification of a standard 3M compression connector makes for a flow-through splice without any pressure limitations. With the Novinium flow-through splice the cable can be treated with UPR or SPR methods and there is zero loss of fluid to the component.

Benefits and Savings

Novinium is the only firm with all three of these tools in its toolbox.  I’m reminded of Maslow’s hammer, popularly phrased: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  If Novinium had only the “Good” approach, the circuit owner would have to accept the “Cons” associated with that approach. Instead, Novinium chooses the right tool for any circumstance – the tool that minimizes the time required to inject (i.e. saving money) and maximizes the post-injection reliability.

With options that can be tailored to your needs,

T. B. Frog

Bait & Switch

Dear Triple-D (Deceptive Denizen of the Deep),

Whenever there is a competitive bid, you guys bid your Perficio™ 011 fluid against my CableCURE^®/XL fluid.  Then after you win – and you almost always do – I find out that you don’t even supply Perficio fluid.  Aren’t you guilty of baiting and switching?  Won’t you start playing fair? Don’t you feel badly offering an inferior product?

SwitX

Dear SwitX-

The only thing that is triple-D on this girl is my belly! Deceptive and Frog don’t rhyme or alliterate for a good reason.

You should write more often. I love hearing from my competitor, but a little more civil tone would be appreciated. A great number of my newest friends used to work for your firm, so I know you work with some great folks. Check the non-compete portion of your employment agreement – we are hiring! Only the best, brightest, and nicest are welcome here though.

And we are the epitome of fairness. There are no secret handshakes. Novinium fluids and processes are all unambiguously documented on our web site. Can you say the same? The “inferior” word is a bit of a low blow. The Latin word “Perficio” means perfected, and Perficio 011 fluid is the perfection of the two-decade-old technology practiced by your colleagues. The formulation is dominated (over 90%) by the same monomer that dominates (over 90%) CableCURE/XL fluid.  However, Perficio 011 fluid is not flammable and, thanks to patented catalyst technology (7,700,871), soak periods are not required to enjoy similar medium term life extension performance. Perficio 011 fluid provides a safer, faster, and better circuit owner experience than the two-decade old technology against which it is typically pitted in a bid environment.

Perficio 011 fluid is, however, “inferior” in one sense.  It is inferior to Ultrinium™ brand fluids. Ultrinium fluids enjoy all of the benefits of Perficio fluid together with a host of performance advantages too numerous to mention. To explore those other performance advantages, start with my January 3, 2011 post on “Catalytic Considerations.”

For almost all of the bids that we earn with superior Perficio 011 fluid, our circuit owner customers choose to upgrade their technology from Perficio fluid to Ultrinium fluid. They do this, because although Perficio is superior to the two-decade-old approach, Ultrinium is safer, faster, and better still! Perficio is less costly (on a first cost basis) than Ultrinium technology for two basic reasons. First the fluid itself costs less, because the monomer, which makes up over 90% of the formulation, is made in high volumes for dozens of commercial applications – high volume means lower price. Second, the relatively small size of the monomer means its viscosity is lower, and hence the time required to inject is less than with the more advanced Ultrinium fluids. Lower injection times yield lower labor cost. The incrementally higher first cost of Ultrinium technology is easily justified by circuit owners because of its longer life.

Finally, I sleep well at night, because my circuit owner friends make the rules of the game. You and I play by their rules. If a circuit owner desires a bid for the lowest price with the technologically lowest common denominator, we have an obligation to provide that option. We don’t recommend it, but we are happy to supply it.  Our view is that when it comes to rejuvenation choices, circuit owners have three … a good choice, a better choice, and a best choice:

Good – Two-decade-old technology invented by Novinium founders.

Better – The perfection of the “good” choice is not flammable and does not require a soak period.

Best – Ultrinium 73X technology, which is tailored to each individual circuit and utilizes molecules designed from scratch for cable rejuvenation.

Don’t Wait to Switch,

T. B. Frog

CableCURE is a registered trademark of UtilX Corporation.

Deep Creep

Dear Deep Diving Frog,

I was reading a paper on your web site “Silicone Injection: Better with Pressure” that was discussing fluid pressures that different cable insulations could withstand. The testing was done at Florida Power and Light and showed that XLPE cable could withstand up to 750 PSI before bulging and approximately 650 PSI before a point of inflection was reached where deflection accelerates with further pressure increases. The pressure was increased 50 PSI every 15 minutes. Have any sustained pressure tests been performed on XLPE cables under the pressures that will be used for submarine cables, since the pressure will be sustained for months?  Also, I assume that shore ends will be a bigger concern for pressure impacts than deep water sections where the weight of the water will be pushing back on the cable?

Regards,

Concerned about Creep

Dear Concerned-

Editors note:  I had to fight my froggy urge to respond "Dear Creep."

Nearby, I have reproduced Figure 5 from the “Better with Pressure” paper, to which you refer, except I embellished it with my lovely image.  I would encourage my other readers to immerse themselves in the entirety of that paper.  First, I must make an important correction to your question.  The insulation of the cable in Figure 5 was uncrosslinked HMWPE or high molecular weight polyethylene.  Cross-linked polyethylene or XLPE has significantly better mechanical properties.  In fact, similar sized XLPE cables were injected “on-the-reel” by Hendrix Wire & Cable in the late 1980’s at pressure of 750 to 1000 psig.  See Table 1, the accompanying text on page 2, and references [5] and [6] of the “Better with Pressure” paper.

The inflection point at 650 psig is labeled as such in the figure. Up to 650 psig the difference in the inside pressure and outside pressure increased the diameter less than about 1.5% – this is less than the diametrical deflection caused by a temperature cycle to the cable’s design temperature.  However, once this inflection point is reached, polymer bonds are actually broken and the diameter change is not entirely reversible. That is, the diameter does not return to its original value when the pressure is removed. Of course, this frog would never get close to the inflection point … we stay below this point by a factor of at least three!

We have not done laboratory experiments with multi-month injection periods, but we have something even better – multi-month operational experience.  At a meeting of the Insulated Conductors Committee (ICC) on May 19, 2009, my colleague, Glen Bertini, made a presentation titled “Lessons in Submarine Cable Rejuvenation” in the C11 discussion group.  Slide 14 of that presentation describes an injection of a 14,432 foot, 1/0 compact, 25kV XLPE cable crossing Desolation Sound in beautiful British Columbia.  Desolation Sound is about 1,500 feet deep at that location.  The fluid took about 100 days, or over three months, just to reach the other end. The injection pressure was about 300 pisg. Several years later the cable remains in operation.

Willing to dive deep, but never creepy,

Thermonuclear