Hi everyone, I'm a student of Control and Automation Engineering at UFMG/Brazil and I'm researching about control valves for a college work. I'll be thankful if you send opinions and suggestions about control valves, as comparative spreadsheets, documentation, good websites to search, application in your companies, type, calibration, costs of maintenance and calibration, etc.. Also I would like to receive real cases in your companies where some type of valve was chosen and why.

The best!

Speaking with better than 35 years experience within the process control industry and having completed five major retrofits of major control systems, I can honestly maintain that he biggest bang for a buck has always been with Fisher Valves. Even after more than 15 to 20 years they have been superlative within our paper mill environment. They cost a premium but in service you will get it back many fold. Believe it or not, I am not affiliated with any Fisher products, but simply giving my opinion based upon experience.

Regards: Nick Stabler

Hi Leandro,
Your set of questions about control valves is very big and vast; I doubt if even senior people in the process industries would be able to answer all your queries in a LinkedIN discussion! For starters, I would recommend that you read a good "practical" oriented book on Control valves (like the one authored by Baumann) to get you started. Then if you can, do visit (maybe with the help of your university) at least three companies, one that manufactures valves, one that does design engineering of process plants and does the control valve selection/sizing, etc and one actual industry where control valves are used. Doing this is not very difficult, will take three days (say one day at each place) but will give you real world knowledge that would be very useful.Then of course, you can read the books, take your courses and you will get a better picture of how these devices function. Note that though the other parts of instrumentation and control technology have undergone a huge change the basic control valve design (the one through which the actual process fluids flow) has hardly changed. Perhaps you can contribute to improving these designs which are literally more than half a century old!