If you want your material handling process to work properly, you have to understand its inner workings. Even seemingly simple components play integral roles in transporting products safely. To ensure you build the right material handling system, we’ll break down one of these seemingly simple parts—rotary valves. Read the quick guide below to begin understanding rotary valve design and how it works.
How Rotary Valves Work
Rotary valves are one type of component in a much larger material handling system. These devices allow manufacturers to carefully and continuously feed materials from one chamber to another. Inside their housing, the rotors act as pockets for transferring goods from the inlet to the outlet. Think of them like revolving doors, where you go into a designated slot and move to the next area swiftly.
Rotary valves function with the help of an electric motor, and you’ll commonly find them in pneumatic conveying systems. The reason for this is rotary valves are invaluable to creating rotary airlocks, which must separate pressure differentials when allowing goods to pass through their inlets.
Differences in Designs
Rotary valves differ depending on the intended application. For instance, the dairy and pharmaceutical industries consistently utilize AL and BL rotary valves, which showcase special design features, such as shaft sealants and rounded rotor pockets.
Partnering with a manufacturer who can provide rotary valves that meet your specific workplace requirements is essential to designing a bin vent dust collector. If you want a dust collector to get the job done, the whole system requires a design that has your unique needs in mind. Otherwise, you can run into problems, such as rotary airlock jams, which need quick resolutions to keep your system productive.
Thankfully, by understanding rotary valve design and how it works, you can prevent such issues from plaguing your workflow. As you can see, rotary valves are fairly simple to understand among the many essential components of high-quality material handling processes.