New smart valve

Jon Lawson

The Type 8652 was designed by Burkert for applications in the pharmaceutical and water treatment industries. It offers users adjustable monitoring and diagnostic functions that improve system availability and process reliability, while at the same time enabling preventive maintenance. An integrated display for this purpose shows detailed on-site information such as the current switching statuses of the pilot and process valves, issues a message if pre-set pressure limit values are exceeded or displays errors such as cable breaks in plain text. During development, particular attention was also devoted to the compact design. The valve island 8652 is significantly smaller than its predecessor and therefore fits perfectly into compact control cabinets that can be placed close to the process valves.

The valve island communicates via common industrial Ethernet protocols or PROFIBUS DP. In sealed ring topologies and PROFINET IO communication, the Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP) for highly available networks ensures that even switch or cable break can be compensated for. This increases system availability and makes processes more reliable.

Every single valve is hot-swap capable, which means it can be replaced during live operation without shutting down the system. As an additional safety function, check valves are used in the exhaust channel. These prevent the unwanted activation of valves by pressure peaks and the resulting mixing of media. Consequently, a reliable process is also guaranteed on the pneumatic side.