A new innovation is bringing the same ease of installation associated with conventional compression tube fittings, to the higher pressure arena – providing an alternative to the time-consuming ‘coning and threading’ practices currently required in the field. Called MPI, Parker Instrumentation’s new tubefitting family provides platform operators with a very high-integrity solution for handling the higher pressures increasingly encountered in oil and gas exploration and production.
Figure 1
Today’s typical industrial ‘twin ferrule’ compression tube-fitting is specified for use at up to around 6,000 pounds per square inch (psi), or perhaps a bit more for smaller sizes. The ferrules inside these fittings are not capable of creating an adequate hold onto the thicker walled tubing typically used for higher pressure operation and such applications typically necessitate fittings based on a cone and thread principle. With these fittings, the tubing does not simply abut to a fitting, but enters a countersunk arrangement – demanding that the tube end is chamfered. For a good joint, these cone ends must be precision-made – a task that is usually performed on-site. The end of the tubing must then be threaded (again, in the field) to allow the tubing to be assembled hard against the joint. It can take up to half an hour each to perform the coning and threading operations and, in difficult field conditions, it is possible to introduce metalshaving contamination into a joint.
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