Importance of Pneumatic Valve in Industry 2021

Posted by Airmax Pneumatics on February 23rd, 2021

In many industries, automation is run by pneumatic equipment. This pneumatic equipment required pneumatic air to be energized or to operate. And the pneumatic air is not other than pressurized air. There was an air compressor, that compresses the air in the tank and releases it as per requirement. Hence, this compressed air passes out with a force that creates enough torque to operate pneumatic equipment. And this is called pneumatic air. Through this pneumatic air, many types of equipment can be operated like pneumatic actuators, vacuum pumps, suction cups, pneumatic guns to fit bolts, drills, and pneumatic valves can be operated smoothly.

What is Pneumatic Valve?

Pneumatic Valve also called as Directional Control Valve, because this device regulates and switches the direction of pneumatic air. These Valves are able to preserve air pressure and redirect the flow line. There are various types of pneumatic control valves available, it can be distributed as per their design principle, types of operations, functions, size, and applications. The pneumatic valves are mostly used to switch the pneumatic airflow on & off in exact proportional control of pressure and flow. These pneumatic valves redirect the airflow to more than one pneumatic device to operate them accordingly. So, let’s check out its mechanism.

How do The Pneumatic Valves work?

Pneumatic Valves are used to fluctuate and control the pneumatic airflow. As per the requirement to operate the pneumatic device like a pneumatic cylinder or an actuator, pneumatic valves control the airflow. Some pneumatic cylinders or actuators behave as single-acting and other than this, designed as double-acting. In one cycle, a Single-acting pneumatic cylinder or an actuator requires one-time pneumatic air, and releasing the air the spring on the other side pushes back to its previous position. So this type of pneumatic cylinder or actuator is also called a spring return. Whereas a double-acting pneumatic cylinder or an actuator needs a pneumatic air supply every time to operate in each cycle.

Types of Pneumatic Valve

As per industrial requirements, engineers have designed various pneumatic valves. They designed the directional control valve, Non-Return Valve, Flow control Valve, Pressure Control Valve.

Here we focus on the Directional control valve. As we all know, controlling the directional of pneumatic airflow in the pneumatic circuit is the main function of the directional control valve. These directional control valves are able to start and stop the airflow and are also capable of controlling the way the air passes. Usually, these directional valves come up with normally open and normally closed forms. Normally an open valve requires air pressure to close and vice versa for the normally closed valve. These valves are also available in 2/2 way, 3/2 way, 4/2 way, 5/2 way, and 5/3 way.

Pneumatic Valve usage

As we have seen ahead, these valves are available in various output ports and positions. Due to the functionality of these valves, we can operate double-acting pneumatic cylinders or actuators. For example, if we take a 5/2 way directional control valve. Which has 5 ports equally spaced and 2 flow positions. It can be also used to isolate and merge a passageway of the flow.