Not Just General Purpose Valves…

Beyond the conventional general purpose valve market where we’ve operated for years at Red Dragon, we regularly succeed in providing valves tailored to meet the demands of difficult applications. These specifications vary enormously and by working directly with our partner manufacturers we can combine options or produce custom solutions specifically to suit the application.

Natural gas trains for power generation or industrial furnaces can provide some very difficult solenoid valve specifications due to the need for safely operating at pressures up to 40Bar. We’ve met their requirements with solenoid operated or solenoid piloted pneumatic valves in sizes up to 12˝ and maintained the necessary ATEX Exd or EXn and EN161 approvals.

Some of the more specialist solutions combine a solenoid pilot with a pneumatic piston actuation to achieve the sealing against the high pressure fluid without the penalty of large current consumption that would be needed otherwise. The engineer might then add that it’s for a remote installation and there’s no compressed air or for safety reasons the valve operation can’t be dependent on a second source of energy. In these cases we offer solenoid coils up to 4000W and control systems to regulate the operation and current consumption as a star-delta starter on an induction motor would.

Red Dragon was asked for fast acting solenoid valves for submerged operations in water tanks which is an interesting combination from a safety point of view! There are IP68 rated solenoidcoils with encapsulated flying lead connections for immersion up to a metre if the site operators will accept the risk of mixing electricity and conductive liquids. Any damage to the flexible cable could prove very hazardous indeed to operators. We avoided these issues by combining a compact pneumatic actuator with a solenoid valve body and produced a very cost effective unit not limited by the 1m IP68 limit.

Solenoid valves aren’t suitable for every application though and an enclosed box filled with 120Bar water spray, mud and debris from drilling definitely wasn’t but it was resolved using a class 2500 ball valve with rack & pinion pneumatic actuator within the enclosure and a pilot solenoid in a separate control panel.

Ammonia systems in power stations and fertiliser plants can be difficult due to the extreme corrosion issues of anhydrousammonia with copper. Our copperfree solutions have proved ideal for this application and we’ve recently shipped a batch of 91 copper-free aluminium filter regulators in sizes from ¼˝ to 1˝ for exactly this duty.

Sometimes a requirement cannot be met by the clients suggested solution. By understanding the complete application parameters, at Red Dragon we identify a way of achieving the correct performance characteristics and deliver exactly what the client needs.

Red Dragon Valves
Tel: 01443 772500
www.reddragonvalves.co.uk

Published: 13th May 2014