Clarke Valve, the exclusive manufacturer of the revolutionary Shutter Valve™, uses Digital Twinning to ensure optimal operational and reliability performance for each process application before each unit is completed and ready for installation.
NASA, one of Clarke Valve’s customers, was one of the earliest adopters of the concept of Digital Twinning. This makes it only more fitting that the Shutter Valve, which was created with aerospace design principles in mind, would use this same concept to simulate precision flow control.
With the help of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, a Digital Twin of each Shutter Valve is created by in-house engineers, so that the Clarke Valve team and their customers can simulate performance and data before deploying their product. The engineering team at Clarke Valve reviews the simulation flow rates, pressure drops, and other fluid dynamic parameters. Evaluating these parameters alongside the customer allows Clarke Valve to optimize the valve before it is built. These simulations are a small fraction of the cost of deploying a less than optimal flow control valve.
Digital Twin technology allows for more predictive maintenance, making it the perfect tool to ensure reliability in high-yield assets. When a Clarke Valve customer is looking for a Shutter Valve for their application, some of the specifications that they will send to the team include the upstream and downstream pressures of the process fluid as well as the flowrate. The simulation of the valve shows the process of fluid flowing through the pipe and the opening of the valve, demonstrating the flow capacity and characteristics of the product.