Hatchery Setter Cooling Manifold and Process Valve Project

This project came along as we were supplying the normally closed process valves to the hatchery for their cooling systems.

 

It was soon realised that simply supplying a valve was not going to differentiate us as a supplier nor would it decrease maintenance cost especially with valve failures.

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Our costs were very competitive and worked in the application however we faced the same issue as our competitors, water leaks due to inferior fittings and pipes along with dirt water being circulated through the valves.

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A solution was needed to reduce potential contaminated water circulating through the valve as well as eliminating water leaks. Three key areas that needed to be addressed were:

• Removal of contamination from the water at the point of use

• Ease of replacement of a failed component

• Ease of access to spares

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Removal of contamination:

Looking back at past pneumatic projects and current layout being used in a majority of the industry, we came up with a concept that would use a manifold to distribute the water to the valves and a Y-strainer which would be removing particles in the water.

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Maintenance:

From a maintenance point of view, we then looked at the practicality of how easy it was to change a valve, and how we could ensure that the valve was fitted back leak free. The last part of the exercise was to look to see how the flexible tubing was connected to the valves and how we could eliminate leaks there.

Spares:

Lastly we ensured that all the parts we used were easily available and common place in our industry, meaning that in the event that we had a valve failure, spares are easily available. Our first 4 station manifold was commissioned in 2019, with the first 6 station manifold following shortly afterwards.

In the two and a half years that the 4 station manifold has been in use, our customer has only replaced one of the four valves on that manifold. In other parts of the plants where they have not yet converted to the manifold they continue to replace valves on a regular basis.