Industrial Automation and Motion Control Blog | The Knotts Company

Engineering Solution - This post is brought to you by Humphrey Products.

Humphrey Products has a Carbon /Sulfur Determinator that improved preformance and reduced costs by using smaller custom manifold.

Customer Requirements

• Reduce inventory costs by standardizing on fewer pneumatic valves from fewer suppliers.
• Reduce the expense of maintaining the inventory and tracking purchases.
• Increase robustness of valve package.
• Allow customer to concentrate on its core competency in instrument design.

The Humphrey Engineered Solution

• Reduced the size and complexity of the pneumatic control valve manifold.
• Standardizing on the Humphrey HK5 valve for all instruments eliminated multiple valve acquisition costs.
• Each unit 100% fully tested.
• Manufactured in clean environment.
• New manifold assembly enhanced the product’s robustness and versatility for field applications.

The Solution and Process

Utilizing Humphrey’s proven HK5 valve in pairs to function as a single 4-way valve, the Engineered Solutions team incorporated the customer’s original system design into a single assembly. The result was a single manifold assembly that was one-third the size of just the original 8-station manifold.

In addition to reducing the size, the new manifold assembly enhanced the product’s robustness and versatility for field applications. Due to the critical leak specifications that needed to be maintained, the new portable unit had to meet stringent performance standards.

Starting with the initial desire to reduce costs by standardizing its inventory, the customer discovered a broad range of other benefits to the Humphrey Engineered Solutions approach.

The versatile HK5 valve would fit virtually all the control requirements, reducing both the purchasing costs and the design costs. Humphrey’s core competency in pneumatic design also enabled the customer to concentrate on its core competency – instrument design, not valve manifold manufacturing.

In addition, utilizing Humphrey to supply a completed sub-assembly further reduced the cost of materials, assembly and testing. Instead of a maze of tubing, connectors and separate components that had to be installed and tested, the customer now could simply install a 100% pre-tested sub assembly.