Development of life test equipment with real time monitoring system for butterfly valves

Small valves including ball valves, gate valves and butterfly valves have been adopted in the fields of steam power generation, petrochemical industry, carriers, and oil tankers. Butterfly valves have normally been applied to fields where in narrow places installing the existing valves such as gate valves and ball valves have proven difficult due to the surrounding area and the heavier of these valves. Butterfly valves are used to control the mass flow of the piping system under low pressure by rotating the circular disk installed inside. The butterfly valve is benefitted by having simpler structure in which the flow is controlled by rotating the disc circular plate along the center axis, whereas the weight of the valve is light compared to the gate valve and ball valve above-mentioned, as there is no additional bracket supporting the valve body. The manufacturing company needs to acquire the performance and life test equipment, in the case of adopting the improving factors to detect leakage and damage on the seat of the valve disc. However, small companies, which are manufacturing the industrial valves, normally sell their products without the life test, which is the reliability test and environment test, because of financial and manpower problems. Furthermore, the failure mode analysis of the products failed in the field is likewise problematic as there is no system collecting the failure data on sites for analyzing the failures of valves. The analyzing and researching process is not arranged systematically because of the financial problem. Therefore this study firstly tried to obtain information about the failure data from the sites, analyzed the failure mode based on the field data collected from the customers, and then obtained field data using measuring equipment. Secondly, we designed and manufactured the performance and life test equipment which also have the real time monitoring system with the naked eye for the butterfly valves. The concept of this equipment can also be adopted by other valves, such as the ball valve, gate valve, and various others. It can be applied to variously sized valves, ranging from 25 mm to large sized valves exceeding 3000 mm. Finally, this study carries out the life test with square wave pressure, using performance and life test equipment. The performance found out that the failures from the real time monitoring system were good. The results of this study can be expanded to the other valves like ball valves, gate valves, and control valves to find out the failure mode using the real time monitoring system for durability and performance tests. © 2017, Turbomachinery Society of Japan. All rights reserved.