Electric actuators from Valpes SAS

Known for 40 years for com­plex solu­tions with pneu­mat­ic rotary actu­a­tors for the automa­tion of valves, Valpes SAS has already been offer­ing a large port­fo­lio of elec­tric actu­a­tors for 10 years. The basis is the coop­er­a­tion with Valpes SAS in Moirans, France, which also belongs to Watts Water Technologies.
The diverse require­ments of the valve mar­ket often neces­si­tate the use of elec­tri­cal­ly oper­at­ed actu­a­tors in addi­tion to pneu­mat­ic rotary actu­a­tors. Var­i­ous prod­uct fea­tures, designs and spe­cial ver­sions are defined and offered with the indi­vid­ual series.
The wide range of these actu­a­tors is pre­sent­ed in the new prod­uct cat­a­log both with the indi­vid­ual series and as a pre-assem­bled auto­mat­ed valve with sev­en dif­fer­ent valve types, thus already cov­er­ing broad appli­ca­tion possibilities.
 
The devel­op­ment of elec­tric actu­a­tors — con­vinc­ing solu­tions and smart features
The app already known for Android mobile devices with the name AXMART® has been new­ly pro­grammed. The fur­ther devel­op­ment is also suit­able for IOS and will be avail­able short­ly. It is an app for con­trol­ling the actu­a­tor via Blue­tooth con­nec­tion, so that even valves in poor­ly acces­si­ble instal­la­tion sit­u­a­tions can be checked or adjust­ed. Note­wor­thy is the cal­en­dar avail­able with this app for each indi­vid­ual actu­a­tor, which can be used to set cycli­cal­ly pro­grammed circuits.
Also opti­mized for dif­fi­cult instal­la­tion sit­u­a­tions is now avail­able the VR/VS actu­a­tor series, which in the stan­dard equip­ment can gen­er­al­ly be rotat­ed by 180°, i.e. used upside down. The project name “Upside-Down” has been apt­ly cho­sen for this. Plant plan­ners and plant engi­neers will be hap­py to make use of this new option when arrang­ing the valves and will ben­e­fit from the safe­ty and func­tion­al­i­ty of the actu­a­tor, which is also guar­an­teed in this instal­la­tion posi­tion. Gen­er­al posi­tion­ing and a space-sav­ing actu­a­tor design are guar­an­teed regard­less of any switch­ing shaft ori­en­ta­tion of the valves in this way.
In addi­tion, this actu­a­tor series now also offers a ver­sion for use at low tem­per­a­tures of ‑40 °C, which will even be upgrad­ed to safe valve oper­a­tion at up to ‑50 °C in the com­ing months.
If the require­ment is more for valves for which a very high torque is need­ed, the Mul­ti­turn actu­a­tor type can be used. It achieves torques of up to 15,000 Nm in valve con­trol. Due to the gear­box con­trol, the use of small­er actu­a­tors is pos­si­ble for var­i­ous valves, which of course means a high­er fac­tor in eco­nom­ic efficiency.
A deci­sive fac­tor in the focus on qual­i­ty and safe­ty is the new equip­ment of the actu­a­tors with the so-called fail-safe func­tion. Cus­tom­ary actu­a­tors of this type real­ize the fail­safe func­tion in case of valve fail­ure as a gen­er­al­ly used tech­nique either by means of a space-absorb­ing spring pack or elec­tron­i­cal­ly by means of a bat­tery pack. For the actu­a­tors equipped with fail­safe at Valpes SAS, on the oth­er hand, an elec­tron­ic fall­back lev­el has been devel­oped. The bat­tery pack is deliv­ered ready mount­ed in the actu­a­tor and con­nect­ed with a sim­ple ini­tial­iza­tion. This addi­tion­al safe­ty func­tion has been cer­ti­fied with an approval by an inde­pen­dent Euro­pean institute.
Anoth­er so-called “smart fea­ture” is the sta­tus mon­i­tor­ing of the actu­a­tor. In par­tic­u­lar, the state of charge of the bat­tery is con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tored. This infor­ma­tion can then be trans­mit­ted to the process con­trol sys­tem via Mod­bus, for exam­ple. In addi­tion, Valpes SAS guar­an­tees func­tion­al­i­ty by means of a pre­de­fined valve cir­cuit in a spe­cif­ic time peri­od. Devi­a­tions can thus be detect­ed and rec­ti­fied at an ear­ly stage.