Patent Grant
10376947
The field of the invention is a fabrication method for a wire wrap screen and more particularly a method to speed up fabrication time by winding and welding multiple adjacent wires at the same time.
Wire wrap screens comprise a perforated base pipe having a plurality of spaced axially oriented rods over which a wire generally having a trapezoidal cross section is wrapped continuously and spot welded to the rods as the winding process continues. Fairly sophisticated machines such as illustrated in FIG. 2 of US 2005/0125980 are used to wrap the single wire around the axially oriented rods to make a screen that is of a particular diameter. As is also illustrated in
Other techniques called pre-pack put a filtering layer under the wire wrap as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,190,102. Other manufacturing techniques for wire wrap screens involve the use of expansion to assemble the wrapped wire and base pipe together as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 8,096,037.
What is needed and provided by the present invention is a production method for wire wrap screens that increases the manufacturing speed of such screens. This is accomplished with a feeding technique that feeds multiple wires that begin at circumferentially spaced locations so that for every revolution of the rotating hub assembly multiple windings of wire are applied and spot welded or otherwise attached. At the opposite end of the screen the individual wires are terminated at circumferentially offset locations similar to the initial end of the manufactured screen so that the ends may be transverse to the longitudinal axis to permit end sealing with caps to be welded or simply by welding the ends to the base pipe and rods that underlie the wire wrapping. These and other aspects of the present invention will be more readily apparent to those skilled in the art from a review of the detailed description of the preferred embodiment and the associated drawings while recognizing that the full scope of the invention is to be determined from the appended claims.
A wire wrap screen manufacturing method for a given screen diameter involves simultaneous winding of parallel wires that begin in circumferentially offset locations on one end of a perforated base pipe that has circumferentially spaced support rods saves fabrication time. Each of the ends of the wires lie in a common plane to allow fitting an end cap for sealing or to just continuously weld at the ends of the wires to seal the assembly to the base pipe. The spot welds to the support rods occur as the wire is wound over such rods. Equal initial circumferential spacing of the start locations for the wires is preferred although asymmetrical spacing is preferred.
Referring to
The method comprises of winding multiple wires such as 16 and 18 at the same time with the desired spacing between them to define the size of the solids that are to be retained on the outside of the assembled screen. Instead of feeding a single wire onto a base pipe with rods 14 as in the past the present method takes multiple adjacent wires 16 and 18 and feeds them with a common pitch to maintain a constant spacing as the base pipe is rotated. As each wire crosses a support rod 14 a spot weld 20 can be initiated. The orientation is such that both wires such as 16 & 18 can be spot welded to a given support rod 14 at a time. Although two wires that are run adjacent to each other are illustrated, depending on the wire feeder design possibly more adjacent wires can be wound at the same time within the scope of the invention. Preferably the start of each wire is circumferentially offset from other wires being wound but starts in the same transverse plane perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the base pipe 10. Because of this an end cap (not shown) can be mounted to each end of the wire wrap to seal the end of the shape made by the wound wires to the base pipe or alternatively the end of the wires can be otherwise sealed to the base pipe 10 with continuous welding or by other means. The attachment of the wires to the rods 14 can be with resistance welding. The preferred wire cross-sectional shape is trapezoidal although other shapes such as round or quadrilateral are contemplated. The start locations and end locations of each of the multiple wires being run adjacent to each other at the same time is preferably even spaced circumferentially although other uneven spaces are contemplated. The multiple wires can be fed in the same plane and as contact is made with each successive wire 14 a resistance weld is formed.
The advantage of the method is shortening the time for fabrication of the same length of screen by a factor of how many wires are being fed at the same time.
The above description is illustrative of the preferred embodiment and many modifications may be made by those skilled in the art without departing from the invention whose scope is to be determined from the literal and equivalent scope of the claims below:
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