Engineers and purchasing teams are being offered a new window into the importance of control valve specification and design following the launch of a new guide from steam specialist, Spirax Sarco.
Authored by Darren Silverthorn, Spirax Sarco’s national controls specialist, Increasing Your Process Productivity and Boosting Process Efficiency highlights the best-practice approach to specifying control valves for your system and avoiding challenges such as product quality and spoilage issues, control valve failure and unplanned downtime.
The steam and thermal energy experts are on a mission to support engineers and purchasing teams in providing tools and the know-how to ensure accurate and reliable process control and mitigate the risk of downtime and product spoilage.
There are three core pillars associated with control valve specification – accuracy, reliability and efficiency
The guide offers a tool to help users find the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) by looking beyond the initial cost at different requirements including process characteristics, energy saving capability, maintenance and support.
The tool also enables users to score against a series of key questions they should be asking their supplier about control valve design and the support they can provide. In turn, this will help indicate towards a valve that can offer the lowest total cost of ownership from those assessed.
“There are three core pillars associated with control valve specification – accuracy, reliability and efficiency.” explains Silverthorn.
“If you are able to fulfil each of these, coupled with a regular maintenance programme, you can ultimately avoid the challenges that incorrect valve specification can bring and instead, leaving you to focus on opportunities to optimise process control.
The guide can be downloaded from the company website.
