Increase your process efficiency with Bürkert

Hydroformed tube diaphragm valves

Bürkert has pioneered the manufacture of valves using hydroforming technology, which is not in itself a new technology. Normally a diaphragm valve is made from a lump of forged stainless steel and is therefore quite heavy. A two-inch valve probably weighs around four or five kilograms. Making a stainless steel valve requires a lot of energy for the forging, a great deal of machining and you’re left with a lot of wastage. It’s not a particularly environmentally friendly way of doing it.

The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t like joints in pipework because they can leave a crevice inside the pipework where bacteria might collect. As such, they often like to weld all their valves into the pipework. That eliminates contamination and makes cleaning easier and more effective. The issue is that when you come to weld a forged body valve to a piece of tube they are chemically different. You’ll also experience a massive heat sink in the forging compared to the tube and it’s not straightforward to weld them together.

With the Bürkert hydroformed tube diaphragm valve the valve is made of exactly the same material as the tube. In effect, you’re just welding two bits of tube together. It’s a very straightforward and easy thing to do, so you’re saving time in the installation. Then of course with all these systems you’ve got to sterilise them. Sterilisation is usually done with chemicals and then steam to kill the bacteria. When you’ve got a big lump of stainless steel in the forging valve, that’s a lot of metal to heat up. It takes a lot of heat energy to heat that valve up to the right temperature. Conversely, it also takes a long time for it to cool down, so that manufactured product can go through it.

Energy saving valve from Bürkert

With our valve being made from a piece of tube, it all heats up and cools down at the same rate, so you’re using less energy. If you’ve got a plant that has 1,000 or 2,000 of these valves, that can be quite a considerable reduction in energy. From an end user’s point of view, we’re offering something that is more energy efficient. Overall, if you’re looking at the carbon footprint of the whole project, from manufacturing the components to running the plant, it becomes a much more environmentally sustainable solution.

When it comes to the installation, you’ve got something that’s a lot lighter and easier to manoeuvre. A lot of manufacturing plants in the pharmaceutical industry are modular. They employ skids that have the equipment on, which are wheeled in and connected to the mix skid. You could have 30, 40 or 50 valves on one relatively small skid. If you’ve got 50 valves with a lump of stainless steel or 50 valves that weigh hardly anything, then you’ve achieved a significant reduction in weight with our valves.

That obviously makes it cheaper and easier to transport, so there’s a benefit for the skid builder as well. All these things add up to a saving for both the manufacturer or installer and the end user in terms of the cost of operating and owning our valves. Not to mention the fact that the shape of our tube valve and the way it’s been designed mean that it has a higher flow through it. We can put a slightly smaller actuator on it and therefore reduce the cost of the valve, as well as the replacement spares, which is another benefit.

Weight-saving electronic flow meter

Another example of an innovative weight-saving solution from Bürkert is our FLOWave flowmeter. FLOWave is designed as a hygienic flowmeter. The only other truly hygienic flowmeter used in the pharmaceutical industry is a Coriolis flowmeter. They are big and heavy. If you have a 2-inch one it can be something in the region of about 1 metre long and 20 kgs. Whereas, a similar sized FLOWave is less than 300 mm long and probably weighs about 3 kg. That’s a big weight reduction.

The second benefit that you have with the FLOWave is that there is no pressure drop across it. Because of the way a Coriolis flowmeter works, you have a bent piece of tube in it that vibrates. That can induce a relatively high pressure drop across it. The pressure going in is at a certain level but by the time it’s coming out it’s lost some of that pressure. This can be an issue. With the FLOWave electronic flowmeter, however, it’s just a straight piece of tube. It’s never going to have a pressure drop on it.

The third thing is that a Coriolis flowmeter requires a lot of electrical power to operate it. FLOWave is a simple bit of electronics with an LCD display and some software. It needs about 10% of the power consumption of a Coriolis flowmeter. Again, we’re reducing the power consumption, as well as the weight, with this Bürkert flowmeter.

FLOWave offers Coriolis alternative

FLOWave has some further added benefits beyond its size, weight and energy consumption. FLOWave’s technology works differently to other flow sensors and, as the software is being developed for it, it has new features coming soon. When we first launched it, customers asked if it did certain things, and we’d say: ‘not yet’. Coriolis flowmeters have been on the market for 25 years and it’s taken that long to get them to where they are now. We’ve had FLOWave for 18 months, so we’re working on it.

We’re developing more software updates, which are going to open up new avenues in terms of what it can detect and measure. These developments will give us some exciting new features. FLOWave can already measure temperature but now it can detect changes in density and the presence of air bubbles or solid matter within the flow. This leads to new ways to use FLOWave, such as allowing the user to manage the phase changes that occur during CIP cycles as the flow changes from water to water and product and finally product. This is normally done using a conductivity transmitter but FLOWave can monitor this and so is becoming a multi-parameter device, rather than just a flow sensor.

For more information about the Bürkert hydroformed tube valve or FLOWave flowmeter, or to discuss your application requirements in more detail, please contact our sales team today on +44 (0) 1285 648 720 or sales.uk@burkert.com.

FLOWave SAW flowmeter

Type 8098

• No obstacles inside the measuring tube, compact, lightweight and low energy consumption
• Conforms to hygienic requirements, CIP/SIP compatible
• Ideal for liquids with low or no conductivity
• Digital communication (Bürkert system bus (büS)/CANopen or IO-Link), parameterisation via Communicator, display
• Optional: ATEX/IECEx certification, II 3G/D