Advantages, Disadvantages and Installation of Butterfly Valves

Overview of Advantages

As a fluid control device, the butterfly valve has numerous advantages due to its unique structure and design. Its main advantages include:

• High Flexibility: The valve plate design of the butterfly valve makes fluid control more flexible, enabling it to respond quickly and achieve precise flow regulation.
• Strong Durability: The butterfly valve, made of high-quality materials and through precise processing, ensures excellent durability and is suitable for various harsh working environments.
• Easy Maintenance: With its compact structure and easy disassembly, daily maintenance and upkeep become simple and easy, reducing maintenance costs.
• Energy Saving and Environmental Protection: The butterfly valve can achieve efficient energy utilization during the fluid control process, reducing energy waste and meeting the requirements of energy saving and environmental protection.
• In conclusion, with its outstanding flexibility and durability, the butterfly valve plays an increasingly important role in the field of fluid control.
• Excellent Fluid Control Performance: When the butterfly valve is in the fully open state, the thickness of its butterfly plate is only a small resistance to the fluid passing through the valve body, thus keeping the pressure drop through the valve to a minimum. In addition, due to the compact structure of the butterfly valve, its length and overall height are relatively small, enabling rapid opening and closing actions, and thus demonstrating excellent flow control characteristics.
• An Ideal Choice in the Field of Large Diameter Regulation: When the opening angle of the butterfly valve is between approximately 15° and 70°, its flow control function is particularly sensitive. Precisely because of this, the butterfly valve is quite widely used in the field of large diameter regulation.
• Compact Structure and Obvious Cost Advantage: The butterfly valve has secured its place in the pipeline system with its lightweight structure and compact body design. Its flow control mechanism uses a thin metal disc. Although it is small in size, it has excellent strength and can effectively regulate fluid flow. In addition, the butterfly valve uses less manufacturing materials. Compared with other valves of the same size, such as ball valves, its price is more affordable, providing an economical and practical solution for pipeline systems in narrow locations.
• Quick and Efficient Sealing: The unique design of the butterfly valve enables it to achieve rapid sealing when started, making it an ideal choice for high-precision flow control applications.
  Low Pressure Drop and High Pressure Recovery: Although the valve disc is always immersed in the fluid, the design of the butterfly valve can maintain a low pressure drop. This low pressure drop characteristic is crucial for optimizing the pumping efficiency of the management system and reducing energy consumption. In addition, its unique design also ensures that the fluid can quickly recover to a high pressure state after passing through the valve.
• Simple Maintenance Requirements: The internal structure of the butterfly valve is streamlined. Compared with other valves, it has no “trap” areas that can capture fluids or impurities. Therefore, the maintenance requirements are relatively low, reducing frequent maintenance and intervention. In addition, the installation process of the butterfly valve is also quite simple. It only needs to be clamped between adjacent pipeline flanges without complex welding steps.
  Easy Operation: The butterfly valve has a quite compact structure and is light in weight. Therefore, it can be easily operated with only a low torque. Its thin metal butterfly plate can easily overcome the frictional resistance of the fluid and can be smoothly opened and closed with only a small amount of force.
• Easy Automation: Since small actuators can provide sufficient torque for the butterfly valve, making its operation more convenient and thus reducing operating costs. This is mainly because small actuators have lower power consumption and do not significantly increase the overall cost of the valve.

Disadvantages and Challenges

Although small actuators have significant advantages in providing convenient operation for butterfly valves, they also have some drawbacks. One of them is that they may not be able to cope with extreme environmental conditions, such as high temperatures, low temperatures, or corrosive environments, which may limit their application range. In addition, although small actuators have advantages in terms of power consumption and cost, in some special cases, their performance may not meet specific application requirements. Therefore, when selecting an actuator, it is necessary to comprehensively consider according to the specific application scenarios and requirements.