EAB Engineering

The Challenge

High pressure, varying temperatures, and accessibility during the installation process are major challenges for the ”subsea plumbers” at EAB Engineering. In business since 1952, the company has specialized in subsea engineering for the past 20 years. Their services include delivery of tie-in tooling and infrastructure from wellhead to point of export. The 15 engineers in EAB Engineering’s development department use SolidWorks® software to design their underwater equipment, which includes components such as a pipe connection system. ”We try to use existing components and designs as much as possible, but since most of our clients want customized solutions, we often need to create new designs. One of the tools we use is SolidWorks Simulation to analyze how the products will withstand the pressure at the bottom of the sea, along with varying temperature conditions and installation forces, but we also check moving parts and see how our products will fit in with other subsea equipment and the ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) that are used to assemble them,” explained Yngve Strypet, mechanical engineer at EAB.

The Solution

The company previously used Microsoft® Word for its user, service, and maintenance documentation. One year ago, they decided to switch to SolidWorks Composer™ to handle that part of the job. ”Because it’s a word processing program, Microsoft Word wasn’t ideal for this kind of documentation, where visualizations are essential to improve understanding. It also was a very time-consuming process. Now we use SolidWorks 3D models as input for documentation and can enjoy the benefits of faster, more accurate, and more detailed images. The installation contractors are very happy with our new assembly instructions which we deliver to them as XF files. We also use SolidWorks Composer for user and service manuals for end users, but those are still produced as paper copies and PDFs.” ”I am very satisfied with the way SolidWorks Composer works and how simple it is to use, both for stills and short videos. We can give our customers a better understanding of how our equipment will be used and provide a better basis for them to make their decisions. As a result, the decision-making phase and the overall design cycle are shortened considerably,” added Yngve Strypet.