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Valve Actuators, Old and New

The term “valve actuator” is likely to evoke images of automotive components for many people with backgrounds in industry, specifically those who have had experience in the automotive industry as professionals or as hobbyists. However, it may surprise some of those people to hear that actuators are used in the control of valves outside of the context of the automotive world. In these other contexts, valve actuators might not be used to the same extent as they are to close choke

valve actuators are likely to increase in popularity.

One of the most intuitive examples of a situation in which a valve actuator would be useful is in emergency shutoff mechanisms for transmission line control systems. Consider the following situation: your company is in charge of manufacturing and installing fluid transmission lines for chemical engineering firms and other similar clients. You’re bidding for a contract against another, similar company that offers comparable products and prices. What would you do to secure a contract in this situation? Among other strategies, you would try to offer a better product. Especially in contexts where your products will be used for the transmission of hazardous materials, it is important to engineer effective safeguards into your product. These no doubt would include safety valves, but how much more attractive would your product be if it could be automatically controlled and actuated by automated valve actuators as opposed to manual controls? Such mechanisms could be integrated into automated control systems that could respond more quickly in an emergency than humans could. If you were the chemical engineering company, which option would you choose?

Of course, different situations call for different solutions. But trends in industry point toward automation, and the companies that realize this will have an advantage over companies that don’t.