• CASE STUDY •
Boosting Performance of Floating
The novel use of plastics in shock— utilizing a low tensile yield strength polymer in valve seats under high impact load.
• By Jill Lawton- Senior Engineer- Flowserve
As global uncertainties rise and armed conflicts evermore in the news, a recent project by Flowserve for maritime defence isolation valve applications put them in a key position to support Operators meeting increasingly arduous requirements.
Flowserve’ s Worcester floating ball valve products can be custom engineered to suit specific technical, and reliability demands of surface ships and submarines. So, when a long serving defence customer brought a complex design requirement to be solved in a tight timescale, the Worcester Ball Valve Engineering team based in Haywards Heath, United Kingdom, were ready to take on the challenging project.
Following the Operators’ revised risk profile, the OEM needed to make a legacy platform withstand a higher shock load than its original design( where shock is very
Figure 1: Section view of a Worcester ball valve in the open position.
Haywards Heath Shock Impact Rig.
sudden and significant acceleration that can cause extensive damage). In scope was a broad range of actuated Worcester isolation valves.
In collaboration with the customer, complete actuated legacy valve assemblies were shock tested at the enhanced shock level, which resulted in valve failures due to through-seat leakage. The root cause of this leakage was permanent deformation of the PTFE seats during the shock event.
This failure mechanism had to be designed out to protect the essential performance served by the Worcester isolation valves. Since this applied to legacy platforms, spatial envelope constraints mandated actuators no larger than those used on the legacy assemblies, and the solution had to be retrofittable and cost effective.
To guarantee the first batch of enhanced valves would be onsite for the maintenance window, the upgrade had to be designed, analyzed, tested, and customer verified within nine
28 Valve World Americas | November 2025 | www. valve-world-americas. com