Characteristic and Performance Analysis for Industrial Globe Valve Using NI-OPC Server Integrated with GE Fanuc on a Virtual Platform

Valve characteristics and performance are two critical factors of Industrial Globe valves in the precise control for any Process control system. This paper focus on building a fully atomized test bench comprising of three serially connected globe valve performance through their different characteristics, namely linear, quick opening, and equal percentage. Pressure and flow tap points are provided to enable data acquisition to study the performance of the valves. The entire testing process is automated using NI-OPC server integrated with GE Fanuc and LabVIEW 15.0 software. Using LabVIEW Lab socket Server, this system can be controlled remotely under common local host. The results shows that the accuracy in characteristics has been improved to a greater extent and more efficient when compared to the manual system. The data transferred has been digitalized which reduce the human errors including parallax errors to get the performance of the valves. Slow response, human dependency and other process errors obtained using manual test bench can be eliminated by implementing virtual test bench. Similarly various control valve can be mounted and tested, and their characteristics and performance can be determined with this system.