Parker Instrumentation has announced it will expand in offshore Europe its breakthrough family of rapid-assembly, compression tube fittings for pressures up to 15,000psi. 

New half-inch sizes provide an ideal solution for handling the high-tensile, duplex and super-duplex tubing often favoured for running down high pressure, deepwater wells, it said.

MPI tube fittings are based on the familiar, industry-standard compression assembly technique.  This allows a fitting to be installed in seconds by simply tightening a nut, eliminating the time-consuming ‘coning and threading’ practices that usually need to be performed in the field when applying traditional medium-to-high pressure fittings.  “Using MPI fittings, instrumentation engineers working in deepwater exploration and production areas can now assemble tubing systems in a tiny fraction of the time previously required.  They also avoid the need for specialised training in installing traditional high-pressure fittings, and the close attention to quality control procedures typically required during assembly,” a Parker Instrumentation statement said.

The new product extends the MPI sizes Parker offers for small instrumentation tubing applications, adding a half-inch option to the existing choices of 1/4, 3/8 and 9/16 inches. The fittings are available in a variety of shapes and flow arrangements including straight connections, elbow and tee joints, bulkhead unions, reducers and adapting interfaces. 
“It can take 30 minutes or more to create the cone and thread required for high pressure fittings”, says Steve Mullen, Parker’s product marketing manager. “MPI can cut assembly time to seconds, delivering major savings in installation costs, and allowing a common style of tube fittings to be applied across a complete offshore platform.”

MPI’s ability to operate at much higher pressures comes from a combination of design factors. These include new geometries for the ferrules which create a dual mechanical hold onto the tubing wall; the application of Parker’s exclusive Suparcase hardening treatment to both of these ferrules for enhanced ability to bite into tubing; longer tube supporting areas within the fittings to enhance resistance to vibration and line loads; and the use of ‘inverted’ threads (swapping the sides on which male and female threads are used).  This latter technique allows the pressure-retaining elements of the tube fitting to be made thicker without substantially increasing either the size or weight of the fittings. 

Parker Instrumentation provides tube fittings, valves, manifolds and enclosures for process and plant instrumentation in sectors including oil and gas, petrochemical/chemical, alternate fuels, pulp and paper, and analytical/high purity.

The company offers its own-design products, as well as those from sister Parker divisions IVD (valves), ICD (fluid connectors), UHP (semiconductor products) and Veriflo (regulators, valves, transducers). Parker Instrumentation has its European HQ in Barnstaple (UK), and serves customers throughout Europe, the Middle East and the CIS. The organisation is a division of Parker Hannifin - worldwide leader in motion, control and critical flow components and systems for instrumentation, industrial and aerospace markets.