Productivity, accuracy, reliability of polyethylene pipe welding

We offer a wide range of reliable, functional devices for private use, use in the industrial sector. This equipment for welding polymers - manual, semi-automatic, automatic complexes, allowing you to effectively, quickly solve technical, technological problems different levels difficulties.

Types, characteristics, features of welding equipment

The technology is based on heating HDPE, LDPE and PE pipes with subsequent connection. This ensures reliable sealing, resistance to mechanical damage, operational reliability of pipelines. Welding equipment is classified into types according to the specific application:

  • manual devices - convenient, mobile, compact complexes, focused on connecting pipes with a diameter of up to 200 mm;
  • semiautomatic devices - after setting the welding parameters, the docking process begins, for which the automation of the complex is responsible. This type of equipment is designed to work with pipes with a diameter of up to 630 mm;
  • automatic machines - independently determine the parameters of the welding mode and carry out soldering of pipes. This ensures maximum reliability of the seam, eliminates technical and technological errors.

The welding speed is determined by the power of the complexes, which varies between 680–12800 W. Functionality is provided by tips of various diameters, which quickly change depending on production tasks– changes in the size of pipes, working conditions.
Additionally, the equipment is equipped with LCD displays for displaying accurate parameters, cooling systems, control temperature regime, overheating protection.

Everything for welding polyethylene pipes

We offer a wide range of equipment and accessories for fast execution technical tasks, operational maintenance and repair. The catalog contains devices and complexes of the leading manufacturers of the segment. These are modifications with a wide range of functionality that provide fast, safe installation of pipelines of various specifications and diameters. We supply fittings and fittings for all types of pipes.
Reliability, practicality of the equipment is confirmed in practice, declared specifications comply with industry standards, technical documentation.

Pipe welding equipment is presented in the online store in assortment. Your waiting free shipping across Russia. Low prices. You can buy pipe welding equipment from us quickly and inexpensively.

Polyethylene pipes are a light and comfortable material for laying communication systems. In order for the design to be reliable, it is necessary to use specialized equipment - an apparatus for welding polyethylene pipes. Before you buy a device, you need to decide on desired model and ways of doing work.

The choice of equipment for soldering pipeline systems depends on the features of the planned work and the method of connecting pipes.

There are several ways to weld HDPE pipes, which differ technological features using various equipment and tools. The most requested methods are:

  • butt welding;
  • electrofusion method of soldering;
  • socket welding

Butt method

The demand for the butt welding method is due to the cheapness of work, low cost of devices and a wide range of pipe diameters that can be connected (5 -1200 mm).

Step by step technology looks like this:

  1. preparatory manipulations. Cutting pipes of the required size, chamfering (beveled pipe edges that prevent an even connection).
  2. Selection of suitable nozzles and their installation in the unit for soldering.
  3. Warming up the device to the optimum temperature.
  4. Placement of pipe ends on nozzles and heating to the required temperature.
  5. Simultaneous removal of sections and their connection to each other. It is important to follow the even connection of the sections and their fixation until the material hardens.

With high-quality manipulations, the output will be a sealed plastic connection without any defects.

Socket welding

Socket welding technology is less common than butt welding, but is also reliable.

During the soldering process, pipe sections are connected by means of plastic couplings - pipeline connecting elements, which are necessary to strengthen the joints and facilitate the assembly process of the structure.

IN last years polyethylene (PE) pipes are actively gaining positions in the water and gas pipes market, becoming the de facto standard for both the creation of new pipelines and the repair and modernization of existing pipelines. The most common way to install PE pipes is to weld them using specialized equipment. As a result, the durability of the gas or water pipeline as a whole depends on the reliability of the pipe connection, so the choice of a machine for welding polyethylene pipes is important task which should be given special attention.

Peculiarities

When choosing a machine for welding pipes from PE, you need to clearly understand what kind of work will be done with it. The features of the desired equipment will largely depend on the welding method that you plan to use most often.

There are four main methods for soldering polyethylene products.

  • Butt welding - this method is the most common, and it is based on the connection of heated pipe ends to each other or to fittings using a special welding mirror. Butt jointing allows you to get a fairly high-quality joint at an affordable price of equipment, but the method is not suitable for joining products with a wall thickness of less than 4.5 mm. The use of butt welding requires thorough cleaning of the surfaces to be joined, maximum precision in trimming products and applying the correct pressure to the pipes during their connection.
  • Docking of pipes into a socket(or coupling method) - a reliable, but less common and more expensive method based on connecting products through a special coupling. There are also options for connecting two pipes of different diameters directly to each other. This method is not used for laying pipelines located outdoors.

  • Electrofusion(or thermistor) welding of pipes - this method is similar to joining into a socket, but the coupling used in it contains a metal heating element, which contributes to more uniform heating of the connected products and the electric coupling. Each electric coupling has a special barcode that encodes the parameters required for this coupling electric current Therefore, devices of this type are often equipped with a barcode scanner. The thermistor method is even more reliable (and more expensive) than the coupling method, therefore it is mainly used in cases where it is necessary to provide a very stable connection (for example, when laying pipelines in areas of frequent earthquakes). This method is used to connect pipes with a diameter of 20 mm or more with any wall thickness, and the requirements for the accuracy of holding technological parameters in it are much lower than with butt soldering.
  • extrusion welding is a method similar to electric welding, in which heated polyethylene is fed through a special extruder into the welding area, forming a connection between the pipes. The strength of the resulting connection usually does not exceed 80% of the strength of polyethylene, so the extrusion method is usually used mainly for connecting pipes with other plastic products and installation of pipes with a diameter of 630 mm or more in places that are not likely to be subjected to high loads.

Kinds

All polyethylene welding devices consist of four main modules - a generator (usually operating on the principle of an inverter with a transformer or a switching power supply), a power control module, a temperature control module and a technological unit in which the connection process itself is carried out. Each of the four welding methods discussed above is performed using the appropriate tool.

The existing machines for each of the 4 ways can be further divided into 3 categories according to the degree of automation.

  • Manual devices- they are usually the cheapest (the simplest soldering iron for manual butt welding costs from three thousand rubles), but they are also more likely to make mistakes when soldering, since they are very dependent on the human factor. Such devices are used only for connecting small-diameter PE pipes, most often in domestic conditions. Typically, butt and socket welders are hand-held, although hand-held extruders also exist. Thermistor welding using a manual apparatus is practically impossible due to the need to establish a certain current mode for each electrofusion.

  • Semi-automatic welding machines- such devices are more reliable and more expensive than manual ones, and the role of the operator in them is reduced to entering all the required welding characteristics (including wall thickness and pipe diameter, welding process temperature, heating time, pressure and cooling applications) into the control panel and process control. Semi-automatic units are made for all four types of soldering, semi-automatic devices for electrofusion welding are especially common.

  • Automatic machines- in such devices, the operator only enters into the computer the main parameters of the pipes to be welded (material and dimensions), and the computer calculates all the necessary characteristics using specialized software and transfers it to the machine, which performs all subsequent technological operations independently. A person only needs to enter the data correctly and ensure that the machine has enough consumables. The prices for such installations range from several hundred thousand to a million rubles, and they are used for welding pipes of any diameter and allow best quality the resulting connection.

Semi-automatic devices are divided according to the type of drive used into mechanical and hydraulic. In devices with a mechanical drive, the force necessary to center and hold the pipes during the welding process is created with the help of the operator, therefore they are used only when working with pipes with a diameter of less than 160 mm. The hydraulic drive does not require the application of force from the operator and is used for welding products of any diameter, including those larger than 160 mm.

Automatic PE pipe welding machines are equipped exclusively with a hydraulic drive.

One more important characteristic welding machine is the diameter of the pipes that it can connect, because the standard sizes of PE pipes are in the range from 16 to 1600 mm. For example, for plumbing in apartments, pipes with a diameter of 20 to 32 mm are usually used, but for the installation of main pipelines, a device capable of soldering pipes with a diameter of 90/315 mm or more may already be needed.

The most popular devices are currently used by firms Georg Fischer (Switzerland), Rothenberger (Germany), Advance Welding (Great Britain), Eurostandard, Technodue and Ritmo (Italy), Dytron (Czech Republic), KamiTech and Nowatetech (Poland). There are also Russian manufacturers of polyethylene welding devices, for example, the Volzhanin plant, which produces equipment for butt-soldering products with a diameter of 40 to 1600 mm and electrofusion devices capable of connecting pipes with a diameter of up to 1200 mm.

How to choose?

When choosing welding equipment, first of all, you need to clearly understand the planned volumes and conditions of work.

  • A huge and expensive industrial machine will be useless to a simple plumber, and a cheap handheld device will not help a company that is laying an industrial high-pressure gas pipeline.
  • If the laying of pipelines is in no way related to your work, and you just want to repair the domestic plumbing yourself, a simple hand-held soldering iron for butt soldering, for example, Elitech SPT-800, will be quite enough for you.
  • When purchasing a butt welding machine, do not forget that this method requires strictly vertical trimming of the ends of the products to be joined, so it would be wise to buy a special electric butt welder together with the welding machine that can cut pipes strictly at right angles to their axis.
  • If you are not confident in your soldering skills, but are not constrained by finances, a semi-automatic electrofusion welding machine, for example, Nowatetech ZERN-800 PLUS, will allow you not to worry about a possible breakthrough in a water or gas pipeline after your repair.

If you are a professional, then first of all carefully study the characteristics of the pipes you use for work and possible conditions their operation. Do not forget the limits of applicability of each of the methods (for example, butt soldering is not worth it at a temperature environment below 15 and above 45 degrees Celsius) and carefully study the instructions for any device before purchasing it.

In cases where the question ultimately comes down to choosing between semi-automatic and automatic, remember that for correct use semi-automatic machine, you need to have experience in calculating all the necessary welding characteristics according to special tables and graphs. When buying a semiautomatic device, you need to pay attention to the possibility of logging, which allows you to save the settings for welding under the same conditions (for example, using the same fittings), which greatly saves time when you often perform the same type of work.

Some semi-automatic devices do not contain a built-in logging function, but may allow you to connect an external device for this.

Polyethylene pipes are lightweight, easy to install and relatively inexpensive. To lay communications of this type, you need a welding machine for polyethylene pipes. Correct Application equipment and compliance with the work technology allows you to get a reliable, almost monolithic connection that will last for many years.

We will talk about how to choose the right device for the formation of strong and tight connections. The article presented by us describes in detail the features of welding sections of a polyethylene pipeline. Those who wish to carry out the work themselves will find useful recommendations from us.

Features of welding structures made of polyethylene

One of useful features polyethylene pipes - this is some design flexibility. Welding makes it possible to preserve this property at the junctions of individual sections of the main, which ensures uniform characteristics along its entire length.

Such pipes are welded both for trench and for, if a steel or fiberglass pipe is used as the main “case”.

Image gallery

Connection types

In the process of constructing or repairing sections of water supply networks from polyethylene pipes, their proper connection is important. Consider several connection options, including welding HDPE pipes. So, depending on the functional purpose, the connections of polyethylene pipes are divided into two groups:

1. Detachable- can be dismantled during the service life, which is optimal for non-pressure systems. a) flanged. They are carried out using bushings for flanges for PE pipes welded to the ends of the pipes, as well as cap flanges made of metal. b) compression. They are performed for pipes with a diameter of less than 50 mm and when connected to elements made of other materials (metal). Optimal when replacing individual sections of the pipeline. c) collet crimp. Designed for pressure up to 25 atm, tightness is achieved due to the presence of a rubber sealing ring.

2. One-piece– during the service life, dismantling is not provided.
a) butt welding. Provides for the use of a heated tool. As a rule, it is used for welding HDPE pipes with a diameter of 63 mm or more, and the strength at the welding point is comparable to the strength of a homogeneous area. Butt welding is considered the most versatile and effective way connections, so consider the technology of welding HDPE pipes in more detail.
b) welding with a socket with embedded electric heaters. Designed for a pressure of 16 atm, it is indispensable in conditions of high constraint, however, it is the most cost-effective type of welding HDPE pipes.

Butt welding technology
The ends of the elements to be joined are fixed in the centralizer of the butt welding machine. After cleaning with a cotton cloth from dirt and dust, the surfaces are subjected to trimming, or machining until the pipes are parallel. Then the ends are heated and melted, close with a simultaneous increase in the clamping pressure. The seam is cooled for the required period of time.

Seam quality control
The quality control of HDPE pipe welding is primarily carried out visually:
- the seam must not be below the level of the pipe surface,
- mutual displacement of no more than 10% of the pipe wall thickness is allowed,
- the height of the roller, outside and inside, should be no more than 2-2.5 mm (pipe thickness up to 5 mm) and no more than 3-5 mm (thickness - 6-20 mm).