Advanced Valve Solutions - Valve Maintenance

Internals removed, inspected, replaced where necessary

Internals removed, inspected, replaced where necessary

Station reliability has never been so crucial. Whether or not you’re at one of our ageing coal powered stations, or one of the many currently installed CCGT fleet, or in fact any of our renewable sites appearing all over the country, including Biomass and Energy from waste.

Simple essential maintenance can sometimes get overlooked, and shortcuts taken in the name of saving time and cost. However, saving an hour cutting corners may result in days offline and thousands of pounds being lost, this is known as lifetime costs. Let’s look a few simple ‘Best Practice’ measures your site should be undertaking routinely.

Are you checking your nuts (and bolts)?

Surprisingly, this is something that often gets overlooked. We all know that valves have numerous nuts and bolts on them, but can you honestly say that your team check the torque of the bolts on a monthly basis? More specifically the torque of your gland follower/packing?

Operating conditions especially those in two shift stations, can, through thermal cycling, loosen bolts, allowing the packing to begin to fail. Torque settings for the valves you have installed can be obtained from the valve manufacturer or through your service provider.

Once you have them it’s worth making a note on your station valve log along with the last inspected date. This information can save a lot of time and effort, when stored in the correct place.

Station Valve Log

Do you keep a master Valve copy or a Valve Log? This is an essential tool, especially when you might be looking for a station upgrade or a more reliable solution from manufacturers such as Hora or Persta. It should include the Valve KKS code or valve identifier, valve type, material type, end connection type, pipe dimensions and operating pressures and temperatures as a bare minimum.

You could even hyperlink the KKS codes to technical data sheets if you have these. But maybe consider limiting the access to such a file, as the more people that have access to this can increase the chance of people unnecessarily editing.

As mentioned above a note of when the valve was last inspected, torque rating for bolts and of course when they were last checked! This creates a list of everything that can be included and is a simple snapshot.

AVS UK can offer this is a service to the customer. One of our experienced engineers can visit your site and obtain all the valve data and compile and manage a valve database for you. We have delivered this at multiple sites and even included spares and replacement valves in the spreadsheet to improve things further for the site. This can prove to be hugely beneficial at outage planning stage.

Actuators

Your car has moving parts and it probably get serviced once a year. So do actuators, but when did you last have an actuator overhauled? Many actuator manufacturers suggest this is done at least every five years. We can provide actuator servicing for all makes of actuators. This will consist of internals removed, inspected, replaced where necessary then fully tested within open and closed limits. We see people stating valves are not performing correctly but haven’t actually set actuator limits or values correctly.

Spare parts

What procedures do you have in place for ensuring you have a set of soft parts for every valve on site? Do you keep critical hard spares in stock, in the right quantities to ensure that operation can continue should something fail?

It seems simple but so many get this wrong. Last minute orders when something does indeed fail and lead times on hard parts can be weeks away. Time = money. We recently attended a site to help analyse their spare parts stock, that had 7 spindles for the same valve. That is a lot of money tied up in a part that is infrequently in need of change.

We have helped several stations across Europe organise stock holdings and suggest recommended parts to be kept on site, to ensure maximum uptime and predictable expenditure.

The service can be a simple stock check and gap analysis to a complete stores reorganisation. From this we update the master Valve Log and ensure all data is correct for our clients. We can ever then offer our assistance at outage times and breakdowns to service and overhaul the valves through our OEM Approved Service Provider.

Tel No: 01270 586 944

Email: info@advancedvalvesolutions.co.uk

Website: www.advancedvalvesolutions.co.uk

LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3I9riOi

 


Published: 23rd February 2022

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