Throughout the company’s near-sixty year history, Rotork engineers have focussed on solving customers’ problems and developing new flow control solutions. Whilst some innovations can be adopted immediately, others demand thousands of hours of testing, assessment and certification before they can be offered to customers.
Continuous investment in product testing is therefore a key part of the policy, ensuring that Rotork manufactures the most reliable valve actuation products in the world. The latest evidence of this activity has witnessed the further expansion of the Product Assessment Laboratory at Rotork’s electric actuator manufacturing plant in Bath. This facility has a long and successful track record of research and development leading to the introduction of innovative and market-leading technologies including IQ intelligent non-intrusive actuation and CVA electric actuators for process control valves.
In one area of the expanded laboratory, new test-rigs and data acquisition systems have been installed to enable increased testing of nuclear actuator products. Rotork’s extensive experience of nuclear operations and nuclear qualifications has contributed to the development of new products, whilst the acquisition of new businesses has further increased Rotork’s scope of supply and service to the nuclear industry.
The latest electric valve actuator ranges for nuclear new-builds is tailored to suit the specific requirements of the internationally predominant nuclear island designs. The NE actuator range has been developed for use in EDF and AREVA (EPR) nuclear power stations. The ND DC (direct current) and NA AC (alternating current) actuator range has been developed for Westinghouse AP1000 Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) nuclear power stations.
These new designs are developments of the widely proven Rotork NA range that has been fully qualified to IEEE 382-1996/2006, comprising a simple single-stage worm drive in an oil bath gearbox, electric motor, torque and limit switches and a separate terminal compartment to which all electrical components are wired. The actuators are designed for a working life of sixty years and the new test rigs will play a critical role in confirming this ability.
The increased investment in testing facilities is supported by additional manpower to meet the demands of research and development across all of Rotork’s increasing ranges of electric actuation products.
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GE Measurement and Control, Inspection Technologies division, announced the issuance of two patents for the use of dual multi-axis robotic devices for parts inspection (U.S. Pat. No. 8,833,169 and UK Pat. No. 2497418B). The patents cover a robotic inspection system that uses a pair of cooperating, multi-axis robots mounted on linear slides to perform ultrasonic inspection of parts. Features described in these patents can be found in GE’s Hydrastar ultrasonic inspection product.
NI, the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced today the NI PXIe-8880 controller, which is based on the Intel® Xeon® processor, and the NI PXIe-1085 chassis, which is the industry’s first chassis that uses PCI Express Gen 3 technology. The combination of the eight-core, server-class Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2618L v3 and full system bandwidth of 24 GB/s delivers breakthrough performance for computationally intensive and highly parallel applications such as wireless test, semiconductor test and 5G prototyping. Customers can take advantage of the flexibility of the PXI platform to replace previous generation controllers with the NI PXIe-8880 and see up to double the performance in their test and measurement applications.
National Instruments, the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, today announced the new CompactDAQ 8-slot controller, which expands the CompactDAQ controller offering to meet high-channel count applications in rugged environments. By integrating the processor, signal conditioning and I/O into a single CompactDAQ system, engineers can reduce overall system cost and complexity while increasing measurement accuracy. Integrated measurement systems reduce the number of components, connections and wiring needed, which often introduce noise and additional costs, to ensure high-accuracy measurements and cost-optimized systems.
The new High Sensitivity Wahl Heat Spy 150 Series Thermal Imaging Cameras are now available. The 150 Series Heat Spy models have a 160 x 120 detector for 19,200 individually calibrated pixels with a thermal sensitivity of ≤ 0.05°C to highlight even minimal temperature differences. The "z" model features a 60Hz frame rate, while the "a" model is 9Hz for export with no license required.