A singular valve can make or break your industrial facility’s success rate. When you choose the wrong industrial valves for your facility, it can lead to costly repairs, dangerous safety failures, and operational delays that could significantly impact your output. Understanding the potential pitfalls is crucial to help mitigate risk and ensure optimal performance.
Industrial valves are rarely seen, but they are the powerhouse behind many large-scale processing plants and facilities that keep the oil and gas sector running. There is an extensive assortment of industrial valves, all of which play integral roles in industrial processing. Finding the correct valve for the job is crucial to ensure your facility’s safety, cost effectiveness, and operational success.
Williams Valve has been manufacturing valves out of our upstate New York facility for over 100 years. We have extensive knowledge of nearly any type of valve and continuously strive to give our customers the highest-quality valve at the best price.
Understanding Your Options: Primary Types of Valves
Most industrial operations rely on a highly diverse range of valve types, all of which are uniquely designed for specific functions. Understanding the variations of industrial valves is your first step to making the correct choice for your processing plant needs. Our team at Williams Valve trains to help you find what you need and get your operation back at full speed in no time. The following types of industrial valves are just some of the most common types of valves we process here at our plant. However, we are able to design nearly any type of valve you require.
Ball Valves
A ball valve features a rotating ball with a bore. The ball feature allows for fluids to smoothly pass through when open, but also offers a tightly sealed closure. They have a quarter-turn operation, which makes them precise to control and reliable for flow regulation.
This type of valve is most commonly used for on and off controls, general fluid services, oil and gas, or chemical manufacturing. Ball valves have a large number of uses, but we don’t advise them for things like slurries or abrasive fluids. These may wear the ball down over time, resulting in less accurate function.
Butterfly Valve
Butterfly valves are equipped with a rotating disc mechanism. Instead of a small ball stopping a fluid’s flow, a butterfly valve uses a disc that rotates with a quarter-turn initiation. These valves are known for being lightweight, compact, and cost-effective.
Additionally, many butterfly valves can be good for throttling techniques. Throttling is a process where the fluid flow is regulated by partially closing a valve. This reduces the flow rate and can help reduce the pressure within the pipe and the valve.
Butterfly valves can also have a number of variations, including concentric and eccentric valves. These engineers place the disc slightly off-center from the fluid flow, which gives operators more control when throttling.
Check Valves
This type of industrial valve is unique because of its automatic operation based on the fluid flow and its direction. It is one of the few types of valves that have no external controls. Check valves excel at preventing backflow, a phenomenon where a drastic or sudden pressure change sucks fluid backward through the pipe. This can pose a high danger, especially in processing plants that pump hazardous materials.
You’ll most often use these for pump discharge lines, boiler feeds, HVACs, or wastewater functions.
Gate Valves
Gate valves are designed with a gate or wedge that blocks the flow of fluid. When the gate lifts, the full force of fluid can flow, but when it closes, it creates one of the tightest seals, ensuring accurate fluid mixing prevention.
This industrial valve variation finds its most common use in slurries, main shut-off valve operations, oil and gas plants, power plants, water distribution, and processing facilities.
Globe Valves
These valves engineer a plug, or sometimes a disc, that moves toward and away from the fluid’s pipe. What makes globe valves unique is that they can alter the direction of the fluid’s flow. These valves offer some of the most precise throttle abilities due to their accurate movement, making them ideal for frequent operation, flow regulation, cooling water systems, or chemical injection.
What Happens When You Choose the Wrong Valve
Choosing the wrong type of industrial valve for your project is not just a minor inconvenience – it can have severe consequences for your entire operation. Along with the potentially significant expenses, it can also result in danger for your facility and the people who operate it. Even issues that may seem like an insignificant leak can rapidly spread to a crisis in a matter of minutes. This can lead to environmental damage and facility-wide failure if left long enough without repair.
Designers create valves with highly specific maneuvers, levels of control, and fluid compatibility in mind. For example, using a butterfly valve instead of a globe valve could potentially result in mixing fluids due to poor throttling performance. This could lead to leaks, bursts, or even hazardous fires.
The Value of Quality: Why Investing in High-Quality Industrial Valves is Worth It
Along with choosing the correct type of valve, it is also imperative that you choose a high-quality, trusted manufacturer to ensure your valves can perform accurately and efficiently. At Williams Valve, we use CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machining to design and manufacture accurate, durable, and high-performing valves. This computer program is integral for precise industrial valve design because it can duplicate valves to our exact specification, every single time.
Along with manufacturing the most common type of valves, we can also custom-design valves for special cases. When we design a custom industrial valve, there are several key considerations that go into the planning process:
- Type of fluid: Including its temperature, pressure, viscosity, corrosiveness, and abrasiveness
- Flow rate: Beyond that, assess the kind of flow control you’ll need and how frequently you’ll throttle or change it.
- Hazards in the facility: Things like temperature, humidity, potential for vibration, or hazardous areas nearby can all affect a valve’s design.
- Physical dimensions: You’ll need to determine not just its size, but also its connection type and how you’ll connect it to your current system.
- Desired lifespan: You can alter the maintenance frequency and performance metric tracking abilities of an industrial valve depending on how durable you need it to be.
Enhancing Your Facility Operations Through Informed Industrial Valve Selection
In almost all cases, choosing the correct industrial valve is not just a technicality. You should consider this a strategic decision that can significantly impact your facility’s safety, budget, and overall efficiency. Each industrial valve variation serves a highly specific action, so choosing an incorrect valve puts you both in harm’s way and in an unstable financial situation. When you work with Williams Valve and let us help you find the perfect valve for your industrial facility, you are investing in the success and safety of your processing operation.
Contact us today to learn more about our available industrial valve supply!
