Oil & Natural Gas: Improved Maintenance & Safety With Valves

In modern oil and gas implementations where the working temperatures and pressures are rising, the necessity for the need for assured valve shut off and safety providing verifiable and absolute segregation are constantly becoming the norm for crucial execution. Globe valve product line is considered to play a vital role in several critical operations where extreme temperatures and pressures are concerns.

Importance Of Valves

Valves are a crucial component of procedures in the industry since they bring partitioning and flow control. In an ideal situation, all valves will give a 100% guaranteed bubble-tight shutoff for increased life span. However, for most of the sector, it is not the case. In challenging operations, service tasks are rarely kind or clean to valves.

Problems Encountered

The problems range from high speeds (especially while valves are opened on multi-phase flow/gas against high-pressure differential) to liquids that are driven with pipelines or foreign particles affected by corrosion, scale, and other debris. These issues are aggravated when valves protect machinery that needs periodic maintenance. In such scenarios, plant operators require two levels of segregation to ensure the integrity and safety of a system. Due to this Globe valve, Double Block and Bleed valve systems were created.

For several years the standard procedure to facilitate double isolation was to have two valves conjunctively and a bleed point amongst these valves to put in place the sealing integrity of the upstream valve. This arrangement is not exactly desirable as more space is required. Along with significant extra costs and extra weight related to the maintenance of having two valves in operation.

Recent Trends And Technology

Nowadays, there are various state-of-the-art technologies accessible to consumers, each of these provide several benefits. There are two major product groupings for this application, Instrument Double Block and Bleed valve. They are the bigger and more exacting application of in-line valves. There are some supplemental technologies and alternatives feasible for the bigger DBB valves.

The primary original technique to double block valve and bleed was to utilise the indentation relief on a trunnion mounted ball valve to ensure corroboration of discharge. The issue here was that the seats were still susceptible to ingress and damage. If the primary seal failed the elastic force on the secondary was usually not enough to hold the pressure. Hence, the secondary seal was inclined to crash. Several seat designs have been used to surmount this issue, and generally, two-seat designs are used.

In DBB ball valves the end product can be top entry, side entry, and also fused body and can be endowed in a sub-sea or above-sea composition. The bleed system for these valves can be globe valve, gate, or ball. The pronounced benefits of these variations of valves contrasted to the conventional DBB approach include lower costs, space and weight-saving; fewer discharge ways, several operational benefits when actuation is needed. Optimum valve selection is crucial to the efficient and smooth operation of all plants.