Selecting the right pneumatic valve that can be beneficial to your machine requires 3 important things:
- Shifting forces: In order to ensure a reliable valve, high shifting forces are required. A valve with higher forces will shift through more contamination throughout its life. How can you determine shifting forces? Speed. Higher forces result in faster speeds. Fast valve = High shifting forces = A more reliable valve.
- Balance: In many applications, it is critical that the same result happens each time a valve shifts. A filling machine must fill bottles to the same levels. A glue dispensing gun must place a glue dot in the same place every time. A sorting machine must eject bad parts consistently. In order to do this, a valve must be repeatable at all pressure levels. This is especially important to compensate for variations in pressure during normal plant operations. This attribute is referred to as a “balanced design”.
- Balanced design = Repeatability = A more reliable valve.