Ceramic Valves: Broad Market Prospects and Recognized Excellent Performance

In recent years, with continuous development of the national economy and strengthened infrastructure construction, valves, as important supporting products of the machinery industry, face fierce market competition while developing rapidly. 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, greatly affecting system operation stability. Traditional metal valves urgently need thorough innovation in materials, design and manufacturing processes.

Ceramics, as a new material of the 21st century, feature extremely high tensile strength, compressive strength, elastic modulus and hardness. These excellent properties have attracted growing attention from scientific researchers.

Ceramics boast an ancient history. As early as the 10th century BC, humans began using ceramics for daily-life tools. Valves also have a history of nearly 4,000 years. In ancient China, wooden plug valves were used in bamboo pipelines when extracting brine from salt wells. In 1800 BC, ancient Egyptians built large-scale water conservancy projects to prevent Nile flooding and adopted similar wooden cocks to control water distribution. These are prototypes of modern valves. Large-scale application of industrial valves began after James Watt invented the steam engine. In the early 20th century, cast-steel, forged-steel and forged-welded structure valves appeared. The true combination of ceramics and valves originated from the demand for industrial equipment upgrading under the low-carbon economy background.

In recent years, competition in the valve market has become increasingly fierce. To adapt to market economic development, new products are continuously developed and applied. Ceramic valves feature four core process advantages:

1. The valve seat adopts hot mounting technology, a relatively complex process. Three-time aging treatment is applied to engineering ceramic seats to ensure sufficient aging stability of the ceramics.

2. Protection lip technology. For ceramic valves handling pipeline fluids containing relatively large particles, a protection lip structure is adopted to prevent large-diameter solid particles from damaging the inner ring of engineering ceramics.

3. Final precision machining after installation of engineering ceramic rings. After ZTA engineering ceramic rings are installed, final precision machining is performed to ensure valve sealing performance.

4. Structural engineering ceramic wear-resistant gate valves adopt double-side sealing to achieve double-side wear resistance.

Valve inner cavities at erosion-prone flow passages are also lined with ZTA engineering ceramics, protecting valve body steel components from medium erosion damage. At present, they are mainly applied in power generation, petroleum, chemical, metallurgy, mining, wastewater treatment and other industrial sectors, praised by industry practitioners as experts in solving "strong corrosion, heavy wear, high temperature and high pressure" failure problems. The emergence of ceramic valves has revitalized fluid-control equipment in these industries. It is believed that with continuous development and progress of science and technology, ceramic material formulation, forming, machining and assembly technologies will become increasingly mature and complete, and the excellent performance of ceramic valves will gain recognition from more and more industry professionals.