African Fusion August 2015

Positioners and wind solutions

Turnkey welding productivity

Kistler Cutting and Welding Techniques, a Ger- man family business that engineers and manu- factures welding positioning and cutting sys- tems, alongwith its South Africandistributor, Mazuret, exhibited its offering earlier this year at the Clean Energy Africa conference in Cape Town. African Fusion talks to Alexander Kistler, the company’s CEO.

T he Kistler Machine Company was founded back in 1966 by senior engineer Roland Kistler, the father of current CEO, Alexander: “My father, a mechanical engineer, came up with an idea for a pipe rotator for welding pipe spools with elbows and flanges. His idea was to clamp the pipe and rotate the entirepipe section so that the seam could be welded in the 12:00 o’clock position. This makes welding easier for the welder and significantly improves weld quality and fabrication productivity,” begins Kistler. “For a re- finery, for example, a lot of complicated

automate thesewelding tasks,” he adds. Conventional wheeled rotators rely on four points of contact underneath the component. “But if an offset or eccentric weight is being rotated, then the component will slip on these rollers as the weight begins to rise, making it impossible to complete a rotation safely at a controlled speed. My father designed a rotator with three wheels, twobelowanda third clamping onto the topof theweldment. This enables an ec- centric weight to be rotated 360°, safely and under accurate speed control. This development enabled the welding of complex components to be automated, because the systemcan compensate for offset loads and the drive torques can be continuously adjusted to achieve constant travel speeds,” he explains. From this initial idea, the company quickly began to add other positioners and rotators to meet the specific weld- ing needs of fabricators. Today, Kistler supplies standard equipment such as positioners, turning rolls and manipulators and designs and manufactures turnkey automation equipment according to custom- er’s specific fabrication needs. Alexander Kistler took

For the fabrication of wind tower sections, Kistler supplies plate seam-welding systems, rotating equipment and the column and boom systems necessary for submerged arc welding of the cans and sections. Helvert’s four-wire welding systems can be used to deposit up to 45 kg of weld metal per hour. ture Bode machines and we have retained the well-known Bode name. But the machines now come out of the Kistler factory in Bad Saulgau in the South of Germany, 60 km north of Lake Constance on the Swiss border,” Kistler tells African Fusion . Alexander Kistler first came to South Africa after Andrew Masuret of Mazolu- tions contacted the company in 2008 with a refurbishment application for Se- cunda. “We engineered, manufactured and supplied a turnkey automation system for recladding conical ashlock vessels for the petrochemical industry in Secunda,” he relates. “These were being done manually at that time, in unpleasant conditions. The vesselswere preheated to 120 °C, with the welder having to work inside the cone. Using our rotating expertise, we developed a fully automated system that significant- ly reduces the health risks. Welding is nowbeing done using Lincoln’s twin-arc submerged-arc process. The rotator tilts the conical vessel to enable welding in the 12:00 o’clock position across the ta- pered internal surface, and some clever automation changes the rotation speed so that the linear travel speed remains constant for an even layer thickness and

pipework has to be fabri- cated with Y-junctions, el- bows, bends and flanges, andmy father’s ideawas to

Roland Kistler, Alexander Kistler’s father, designed a rotator with three wheels,

two below and a third clamping onto the top of the weldment. This enables an eccentric weight to be rotated

360°, safely and under accurate speed control.

over from his father after finishing his studies as a me- chanical engineer in 1989. “Then in 2000, ourmain competi- tor, Bodewent bankrupt andwe purchased the intellectual property rights and the

Bode name. This was a breakthrough for us, because it gave us ac- cess to a large portfo- lio of machines and a substantial global customer base,” he says. “Today, we continue to manufac-

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August 2015

AFRICAN FUSION