This SAMSON PFEIFER valve allows the efficient handling of highly viscous media. The 25e angle ball valve is designed and manufactured by PFEIFER Chemie Armaturenbau GmbH in Kempen. The special valve was designed by Michael Gartz. “We are the only supplier in the world who can provide the technology for this difficult process,” says the team leader for design/development/product maintenance. SAMSON PFEIFFER developed and built the 26-centimeter-high, 42-kilogram stainless steel ball valve made exclusively for a customer in the chemical industry. “The product is manufactured from A to Z in Kempen,” says Michael Gartz, who has been working for the metal construction company at Hooghe Weg 41 in Kempen since 1994. The 50-year-old learned his trade from scratch: he started as a lathe operator, later reskilled as a product designer, and finally advanced to a design engineer via distance learning.
The order was triggered by the fact that there was considerable contamination on the transport rollers during the filling process. “The result was a high degree of cleaning in the filling process, which also slowed down production,” reports Michael Gartz. The manufacturer of the filling unit was unable to implement a contamination-free filling process.
In concrete terms, the chemical company produces pre-products with different viscosities that can be found in various everyday life end products.
The challenge for team leader Michael Gartz was to create a ball valve that would handle the pre-products with the different viscosities of between 5 – 4900 Pas at high temperature and high pressure into the containers without stringing, to avoid further contamination on the transport rollers.
