New Wear-Resistant Ceramic Valves: Excellent Economic Benefits and Rapid Development

At present, metal valves are widely used across various domestic industries. Metal valves have a history of over a hundred years. Despite improvements in structure and materials, inherent limitations of metal materials make them increasingly unsuitable for harsh working conditions involving heavy wear and strong corrosion, mainly reflected in short service life and serious leakage that greatly undermine system operation stability. Traditional metal valves urgently need thorough innovation in materials, design and manufacturing processes. Advanced ceramics, as a new material of the 21st century, have attracted growing attention from scientific researchers. Applying them to industrial valves is a bold and beneficial innovation.

Ceramic materials feature extremely small deformation and much higher bonding strength than metals. Generally, constituent crystal ions of ceramic materials have small ionic radius, high ionic valence and large coordination number. These properties determine that ceramic materials possess extremely high tensile strength, compressive strength, elastic modulus and hardness. However, the inherent brittleness and machining difficulty of ceramics once limited their application scope. Over the past decade or so, thanks to the development and progress of martensitic transformation toughening, composite material technology and nano-ceramic concepts, ceramic brittleness has been greatly improved. Their toughness and strength have been substantially enhanced, and application scope continues to expand.

In recent years, new ceramic materials are very actively applied in petroleum, chemical, machinery and other fields. Using ceramic wear resistance and corrosion resistance to manufacture wear-resistant and corrosion-resistant parts as substitutes for metal materials has become one of the important development directions of the high-tech material market.

Wear-resistant ceramic valves deliver enormous socio-economic benefits:

• 1. Adopting high-tech new ceramic structural materials for sealing and wearing parts of valves improves wear resistance, corrosion resistance and sealing performance of valve products, greatly extending valve service life.

• 2. The use of ceramic valves reduces valve repair and replacement frequency, improves safety and stability of supporting equipment systems, reduces workers' labor intensity and saves equipment repair costs.

• 3. Ceramic valves improve sealing performance of industrial piping systems while minimizing leakage to the greatest extent, making positive contributions to environmental protection.

• 4. Ceramic raw materials are widely available with low cost. High-performance ceramic materials can be produced from common elements such as aluminum, carbon and silicon, saving large amounts of metal materials and scarce mineral resources.

New wear-resistant ceramic valves are mainly applied in power generation, petroleum, chemical, metallurgy, mining, wastewater treatment and other industrial sectors. Especially under harsh working conditions involving heavy wear, strong corrosion, high temperature and high pressure, they demonstrate outstanding performance. They satisfy high-wear and strong-corrosion service environments, and their most prominent feature is ultra-long service life with performance-to-price ratio far surpassing comparable metal valves. With continuous development and progress of science and technology, ceramic technologies in formulation, forming, machining and assembly processes have become increasingly mature and complete. With their excellent performance, ceramic valves have gained growing recognition from industry professionals. The successful experience accumulated from ceramic valve manufacturing can also be promoted and applied to broader mechanical engineering fields.