VERSA Blog

Although good Industrial practices always demand the use of filtered, clean, air to ensure a longer life for the internals, often no consideration is given to environmental ingress into the valves.

We find that many valves are installed with limited to no protection on the exhaust ports and the solenoid operators.

When valves are open to the environment, there is a risk of ingress from the weather, airborne contamination, dust, sand, dirt, and insects. Over time this can shorten the life of the valve and impede the top performance you expect.

No matter the industry, downtime is not an option. Even a short time offline can cost millions of dollars in production losses, not to mention the safety issue of sudden failures. Demands for modern efficiency make reliability more critical than ever.

With many industrial applications dependent on solenoid valves for process automation, it’s important to ensure your system is built for Real World Reliability.

VERSA has over 70 years of real-world experience. We know exactly what our valves are put through on a daily basis, and we know what it means to our customers to keep those valves running.  

Versa’s shuttle valves are a popular accessory in a variety of applications that require OR circuits for automatic switching to the higher of two input signal pressures. One longtime user of our shuttle valves recently asked Versa to adapt our concept to allow the opposite: output the lower of two input pressure signals. Versa accepted the challenge.

The rack and pinion actuator, controlled by a simple NAMUR valve, is popular and widely used to actuate quarter-turn ball and butterfly valves across a multitude of industrial and process control applications. Valve automation specialists apply this solution in food and beverage processing, pulp and paper, steel production, and oil and gas, just to name just a few applications.

VersaSelect is now available as an online tool to help you identify the right Versa products based on your specifications, compare similar products, access product documentation, and buy online. This tool is designed to help you easily specify, vet, and select valves and accessories to get you up and running quickly.

Many solenoid valve installations for process valve automation are in environments that require some kind of solenoid and body exhaust protection. Most installations use a form of sintered metal muffler or filter, however these options tend to clog and become less efficient at protecting the valve. Any restrictions in exhaust flow have potential to affect the ability of the valve to switch position.

Latching valves are particularly suited to applications where it is desirable or mandatory to manually reset or restart a system.

A typical application could involve the emergency shutdown of automatically monitored process operations. Loss or interruption of the control signal to the valve actuator causes the valve to shift, latch, and shut-down a process step. When the signal is restored the valve remains in the latched position until the operator manually unlatches it and allows the process step to resume. Positive latching in such an application is vitally important since many process operations are sequential and one step must not be started until the one ahead of it has started.

If ever there is a time when a system absolutely cannot fail, it’s your emergency shut down safety system during an event. These systems are critical to minimizing the impact of potentially disastrous situations such as fire, process irregularities, or storms.

The solenoid valve, frequently taken for granted as a commodity, is actually an essential component in the Emergency Shut Down system. How the solenoids function can mean the difference between a successful emergency shut down or failure. Failure can result in loss of life, an environmental catastrophe, and/or significant financial loss for your organization.