Automated Valve Pressure Test System
Austin Reliability Labs can provide step by step custom testing solutions for your products by getting them through the design stage to the execution of the test. The custom testing our lab can provide will quantify performance, warranty, wear-out, maintenance and other valuable information for decision makers. Our technical staff understands testing and realizes that our clients need state-of-the-art test procedures that will remain relevant throughout the product’s life cycle. We work closely with our clients to determine the tests that best fit the product and document a testing road map that is appropriate, useful and comprehensive.
One of ARL’s recent clients had an issue – the customer needed to test thousands of duckbill check valves for pressure and flow rate on an ongoing basis. Multiple duckbill check valves are inside the customer’s product, and if those valves all have equal flow rates their product is optimized – if the flow rates vary from valve to valve, the product becomes sub-optimal. Although the customer was able to use human capital to manually test each valve, that method had proven to be inefficient and to produce highly subjective results that could affect the final product in the field. The customer needed an automated test system that could not only test each valve for pressure and flow rate, but then characterize each valve as either Type A, Type B or Fail according to the customer’s specific parameters for each. Finally, to fully automate the process each valve would need to be sorted into bins according to that characterization. No test system currently available could do this.
Austin Reliability Labs custom-built a test system for this customer that will automatically test, characterize and sort each valve into bins according to the characterization. Fully programmable software will allow the customer to change their parameters for Type A, Type B and Fail at any time. The system tests 100 valves in just under 10 minutes, so with one staff member resetting the test every ten minutes this system could result in as many as 5,000 valves tested, characterized and sorted every 8 hours with minimal labor investment and more dependable results. Future versions of this test system should be even faster. To see this test in action, see the video below.
