6 WAY ZONE VALVE

The most compact six-way zone valve in the HVAC industry with QM (Quick Mounting) assembly between the valve and the actuator, and directly connect to the flexible hoses. The six-way zone valve allows you to manage the supply to a single user from two different sources of thermal energy, or to easily manage 4-pipe systems (typically used in heating and cooling applications). A single actuated valve can substitute two or more actuated valves, easily resolving any complications with synchronization for the opening/closings of the two sources. The six-way zone valve allows the system change-over from heating to cooling within the quarter turn and also the simultaneous closing of the supply from both sources at 45°.

These valves are typically used in radiant ceiling systems, in particular for the service sector, where the change-over from heating to cooling can be easily managed, even when this is required during the same day, and can be carried out independently for each zone.

Automated Flow Balancing Valve

The Automatic Flow balancing Valve uses the latest flow technology to assure that the designed flow rate is achieved at all the times, in the whole system, irrespective of any pressure changes within the system. The solution ensures the desired flow rate for your cooling or heating water distribution system. In brass with 1/2″ sweat end connections, available with 0.5 GPM increments up to 6 GPM.

Pipes and other engineering services in industrial building

Dampers make up a critical part of HVAC systems and getting the selection right is vital to long term performance. Here’s what you need to know to choose the right damper.

The basics

Dampers are used to control airflow through certain portions of an HVAC system. You may need them to open and close or you may need them to modulate for variable airflow. They may be duct-mounted, wall-mounted or integrated into air handling equipment. Specialized dampers like smoke dampers limit the spread of smoke through ductwork and air transfer openings.

Dampers are constructed from metal (aluminum or steel) and consist of a frame and moving blades. The position of these blades determines how much air can flow through. Dampers may be have parallel or opposed blade arrangements. Parallel blade dampers are better suited to open/close applications while opposed blade dampers work well for modulating airflow.

Sizing and selecting a damper

Sizing a damper begins with the maximum airflow through the damper using the equation:

Airflow = Velocity x Cross-sectional area.

For dampers, the cross sectional area is the free area, which is the area available for air to flow when the damper is fully opened. Manufacturers publish this information in charts. Once you calculate your free area for a given velocity, use these charts to find the height and width for your damper.

To ensure that the dampers don’t create airflow problems in your system, the fan must be able to overcome the damper pressure drop. Depending on the situation, you may have to oversize your damper to reduce the pressure drop.

Fire damper for fire protection system on the roofing floor.

Choosing a velocity to size the damper depends on the application. The velocity for intake should be limited to 450-500 feet per minute (fpm) to prevent rain from entering. Exhaust velocities can go up to 1200 fpm.

Another decision you have to make when selecting a damper is whether the blades need to be weather-sealed or insulated. Weather sealed and insulated dampers are suitable for intake and exhaust dampers that are open to the exterior.

Controls

Dampers can be manual or automatic and with the increase in building automation, getting control right is important. This is where actuators come in. Our next article will discuss actuators in more detail.

2-way brass ball valve with iso top flange Enolgas USA

Ball valves with Teflon seals have some unique characteristics that you cannot find in other types of traditional valves, such as butterfly valves, plug valves, gate valves, solenoids valves, etc. Ball valves have the best ratio among pressure, flow rate and price.

The specific characteristics of ball valves are:

1. THE SECURITY OF SEAL

The seal is hermetic under normal conditions. Teflon seals can adapt to the relevant surface due to the precise loading, which can be obtained. Once operative the seal remains constant and the wear is limited, due to self-lubricating properties of the material. Teflon seal is elastic and can re-adapt to its original shape, provided expansion or contraction of the valve keeps the deformation within acceptable limits. Unlike most valves, the ball valve obtains a secure seal due to the inlet pressure of the fluid, compressing the ball against the opposite seal proportional to the actual inlet pressure.

2. VARIETY OF APPLICATIONS

Ball valves with Teflon seals are suitable to most fluids, which are compatible with brass, e.g.:

1. Gases: Methane, Ethane, Propane, Butane, Argon, Freon, Oxygen, etc.
2. Oils: vegetable, mineral, synthetic, hydrocarbons in general and all carbon fuel derivations such as Diesel, Petrol, Kerosene, etc.
3. Sundry: air, cold and hot water, low-pressure steam to a maximum of  +248°F  (+120°C)

3. VERSATILITY

Ball valves are suitable for low and medium pressures as well as vacuum conditions. They are ideal for both low and high temperature from -4°F +302°F (20°C to + 150°C) respectively.

4. PORT CAPACITY

Ball valves have a port with a circular section equal to the tube; therefore there is no turbulence in the flow, and this, in turn, reduces the loss of pressure head.

5. FUNCTION

Ball valves give the operator an immediate visual position of the valve status even at a distance. When the handle is parallel, to the valve and pipe, the valve is open. When the handle is at a right angle, (perpendicular) to the valve and pipe the valve is closed. The on/off operation is quickly and positively achieved by a ¼ turn of the handle, and therefore confusion and mistakes are minimized. Rotation of the ball in operation continually cleans the surface and therefore eliminates contaminants, which could cause a leak in conventional valves.

6. MAINTENANCE-FREE

Ball valves eliminate the need for lubricating materials due to the self (dry) lubricating properties of Teflon. Therefore a contaminant-free environment exists, and possible causes of leakage are reduced to a minimum. Because the valve and seals are constructed to close tolerances, it is unnecessary to carry out adjustments (or maintenance) during the life of the valve.

7. DESIGN

Ball valves are designed and constructed to fit comfortably into a pipeline, with a minimum of bulk, while retaining strength and durability for the life of the valve. The handle operation of a ball valve can be made left or right hand, while the flat handle can be replaced with a tee-handle the clearance is a problem in cramped spaces.

For an more information, visit www.enolgasusa.com or the Enolgas USA blog, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube.

3-way brass ball valve with iso top flange Enolgas USA

Jade Stainless Steel Manual Valve Enolgas USA

Actuated Brass Ball Valve with Quick Mounting

2-way brass ball valve with electric actuator Enolgas USA

2-way Electric actuated brass ball valve Enolgas USA

Cape Town, South Africa, a city roughly the size of Los Angeles, is about to run out of water — completely.

Authorities are warning that as soon as May 11 — which they’ve ominously dubbed “Day Zero” — the drought-stricken city will have to cut off taps to all homes and most businesses, leaving nearly all of the city’s 4 million residents without access to running water.

Residents will then have to go to roughly 200 collection points scattered across the city to collect strictly rationed water. People will be allowed just 25 liters — about 6.5 gallons — of water a day. That’s all the water they’ll have for drinking, bathing, flushing toilets, and washing their hands.

Some services like hospitals, clinics, and schools will be exempt from the cutoff and will continue to have access to running water. But the overwhelming majority of the megacity’s residents will have to work with their tiny daily allotment.

Experts say the possibility of civil unrest is high. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world in terms of income, and Cape Town has the highest murder and robbery rates in the country.

So what’s going on? How does a major, modern city in 2018 completely run out of water? And what will happen if and when it does?

How did things get this bad in Cape Town?

The story of how Cape Town went dry is remarkable because up until a few years ago, the city was held up as an example of a place with particularly sophisticated water conservation policies. Cape Town has been proactive in coming up with new ways to conserve water since at least the turn of the millennium, experts say.

For example, the city worked hard to fix leaks in the pipes that distribute water across the city. Leaky pipes are not a trivial matter — on average around the world, leaky pipes account for between 30 and 40 percent of a city’s lost water, Shafiqul Islam, an expert on water management at Tufts University, tells me. Cape Town has reduced the amount of water it loses through leaks to about half of that. And in 2015 — just three years ago — Cape Town even won a prestigious international award for its water conservation policies.

But 2015 also marked the beginning of a devastating three-year drought unlike anything the city had seen in more than a century. The drought exposed a key problem in the city’s water supply: its near-total reliance on rainwater. Unlike many other cities, which can draw their water supplies from various sources like underground aquifers or through desalination plants, Cape Town gets more than 99 percent of its water supply from dams that rely on rain.

Cape Town’s government thought its dams were big enough to deal with a drought — but they weren’t designed to deal with a once-in-a-century type of drought. While they were completely full just a few years ago, the dams now stand at about a quarter capacity.

There’s also a political dimension to the crisis. Cape Town and the province it’s in, the Western Cape, are governed by a party called the Democratic Alliance. But the national government (and every other provincial government in the country) is run by another party, the African National Congress (ANC).

Analysts say that partisan differences helped lay the foundation for Cape Town’s sluggish response to the drought in its early stages, and made it harder for the local and national government to form a united front once the water shortage became evident.

William Saunderson-Meyer, a South African journalist, points out that the national government had a clear incentive to drag its feet in helping the city get enough water: It may stand to benefit politically from a botched response to the shortage.

“Many ANC politicians would love to see the liberal ruling Democratic Alliance tarnished by failure in the Cape, perhaps opening the way to the ANC recapturing the province in 2019,” he writes at Reuters.

The flat-footed policy response to the drought has made the crisis even larger than it would’ve been otherwise.

Warding off Day Zero will require a lot of collaboration — and luck

Day Zero is not inevitable. It is possible that Cape Town’s population can collectively reduce its water usage quickly enough to prevent water levels in the city’s dams from dropping so low that water needs to be cut off.

Day Zero is supposed to kick in when they the dam levels drop to 13.5 percent. Theoretically, it’s possible that water levels won’t hit that point. The projected date for Day Zero was recently moved from mid-April to May 11 because of a decline in water usage from the agricultural sector in the province surrounding Cape Town.

But a key factor is urban usage — how much water people use at homes and business in the city. And though the government has warned of Day Zero and attached fines to exceeding its daily limits in recent months, urban usage hasn’t declined significantly.

In January, the government said that no individual should be using more than 87 liters (23 gallons) of water a day, but a majority of the city’s residents went ahead and did so anyway.

“Despite our urging for months, 60 percent of Capetonians are callously using more than 87 liters per day,” Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said during a press briefing on January 18. “It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero.”

This month, Cape Town’s government has called for residents limit their water use even more — to 50 liters a day. The fines have increased as well, particularly for people who are using far too much water.

Cape Town residents not only need to collectively decide to start complying with the city’s usage restrictions, they need to do it until the city gets its long-awaited winter rains. According to Kevin Winter, an urban water management expert at the University of Cape Town, the city has seen its winter rains come later and later in the year over the past decade. While in the 1970s, the rains reliably started around April, recent patterns suggest that this year, substantial rain is more likely to come around July.

But if the current water restrictions don’t work and Day Zero does happen, things could get dicey in Cape Town, fast.

Day Zero could cause chaos in Cape Town

Day Zero is going to pose some big logistical challenges. Each of the water collection points will serve roughly 20,000 residents, many of whom will have to trek out to the sites daily.

South African police and military forces will be deployed to guard collection points, but with such small amounts of water provided at such a limited number of sites across the city, things could get rough. “The government’s first and foremost priority is going to be to try to quell anarchy,” says Patrick Reed, an expert on sustainable water management at Cornell University.

While wealthy residents are already installing private water tanks in their homes, lower-income residents don’t have any obvious solution for getting any more than their tiny daily allotment. And for the very poor who may live far from a distribution point and lack access to reliable transportation, just fetching that water is a challenge.

People would have to risk missing work or making less money just to be able to ensure they could get water to their homes.

Reed sums up the dilemma: “Would you be willing to get fired to get your water?”

Shafiqul Islam, the expert on water management at Tufts University, says that while it’s hard to predict outbreaks of violence in crises like this, the conditions in Cape Town are a natural tinderbox.

“Will it happen? We do not know. Is it likely to happen? Yes,” Islam says.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to solve and analyze problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate the interaction of liquids and gases with surfaces defined by boundary conditions. With high-speed supercomputers, better solutions can be achieved. Ongoing research yields software that improves the accuracy and speed of complex simulation scenarios such as transonic or turbulent flows. Initial experimental validation of such software is performed using a wind tunnel with the final validation coming in full-scale testing.

At Enolgas USA, CFD is available for specific process and requests. Check out our Technical Support, the Conversion Calculator and the Flow Coefficient Calculator.

What Does an Electric Actuated Ball Valve Do?

Before you start your quest to find the ideal electric actuated ball valve, you should know just what they do. These valves serve an array of industrial and commercial applications. In HVAC, they direct air flow in certain manufacturing operations. Even when they’re used to move water, electric actuated ball valves are technically listed as an HVAC component. The most common use in this regard is in industrial water chillers, which help cool any equipment that’s at risk of overheating.

In addition, electric actuated ball valves are ideal for situations that lack a compressed air supply, as well as applications where a solenoid valve is incompatible.

Electric Actuated Ball Valves Versus Other Ball Valves

When you’re trying to control air flow, you have an endless amount of options. Pneumatic, manual, hydraulic, and spring ball valves are all easy to find and work for most projects. The advantage of employing electric actuated ball valves is that they’re easily wired in parallel electric circuits, providing a plethora of benefits that keep your system running smoothly as long as power continuously runs to the valves. Other valves rely on other types of sources to work, and most often, they aren’t nearly as easy to control or access.

What are the Advantages of Electric Actuated Ball Valves?

In short, the advantages of electric actuated ball valves lie in their versatility. For example, these ball valves come in a variety of materials to suit the task at hand. Stainless steel, brass, and PVC (polyvinyl chloride) are three of the most popular materials for the valves, offering different price ranges and benefits. For example, stainless steel is more malleable than other substances, while PVC is an inexpensive alternative.

Electric actuated ball valves also come in two-way and three-way varieties. This helps streamline the automation process for your needs. Two-way varieties can accurately turn air flow on and off at the touch of a button, or as part of an automated unit. Three-way valves allow you to close air flow or change air flow in rapid succession for maximum efficiency.

When you need electric actuated ball valves for your business, you don’t want to take chances on units that lack quality or durability. That’s what makes Enolgas USA a solid choice. Since 2008, Enolgas USA has produced only the highest quality actuators and valves in the world. Don’t hesitate to contact them for your next purchase. It might be the best choice you make.

What Are Valve Actuators?

To understand what an electric actuated valve is, you first need to understand the nature of valve actuators. A valve actuator is any device that employs a source of power to open or close a valve.

Often, that source of power is a human being. As in, a person must be present at the valve site to apply rotational force in order to open or close the valve. As you can imagine, this is often inconvenient and can cost precious time. For example, if there is an emergency within a plumbing system you may have to wait hours until a plumber can shut off the valve if you’re not familiar with how to do it.

Other valves are automatic. They may be operated by a variety of means, including electricity, hydraulics, air, or springs.

Advantages of Electric Actuated

The biggest advantage of electric actuated valves is they can be remotely operated. Therefore, if there is a plumbing emergency the valves can easily be shut off before a bad situation gets any worse.

Electric actuated valves are also energy efficient. Not only can they prevent excess water flow, thereby saving you money on your water bill, but the valves themselves do not consume a great deal of energy. According to Flow Control Network, which focuses on designing, maintaining, and operating fluid control systems, “It is often said that control valves wastefully expend energy, but this is not true. Modern control valve design and sizing methods allow for the use of pumps with smaller head pressures, resulting in less energy absorption via the pressure drop across a control valve.”

Electric actuated valves are often used in industrial settings, but they can be useful in any fluid management system.

Electric Actuated Valves as Part of a Water Security System

A water security system can prevent flooding, prevent water damage, and reduce water waste. Electric actuated valves can be an integral part of such a system. The valves may have sensors that detect when water flow is too high and automatically shut off. This monitoring capability does not consume a lot of energy and can be especially valuable when you are away from home for extended periods of time and aren’t around to notice if something is off with your water system.

You don’t have to be an expert to understand that electric actuated valves can benefit you and your home. If you would like to learn more about electric actuated valves and water security systems, contact Enolgas USA, Inc. today. The experts there will make recommendations for your home so you can take advantage of modern technology that will make your home more secure and more efficient.