Customer Issue
Our customer designed a wine dispenser that required two food-grade solenoid valves, including one at the outlet to control dispense volume.
Project Requirements
- Wetted materials cannot alter the wine’s taste
- No dripping at the dispensing outlet
- Maintenance-free
- Voltage: 12VDC
- System pressure: 2.5 bar
- Reduce valve costs to meet the overall dispensing unit cost
Custom Valve’s Solution
Custom Valves’ standard dialysis valve is applicable for food-grade applications. Since it was immediately available, we started with the standard dialysis valve design to minimize design turn-around time.
The dialysis valve required the following design changes to adapt it the customer’s application requirements:
- The standard valve body material, PPSU, altered the wine’s taste. It was switched to a chemical resistant 316SS valve body to preserve taste.
- The dialysis valve’s solenoid system was too large to fit the client’s dispenser system. So it was switched to a smaller, less expensive solenoid system to meet requirements and save money.
- Investment casting was used, and only the sealing surfaces and threads were machined to reduce production costs.
The Results
The SV0021 food grade valve was developed. It produces dripless dispensing with an unaltered taste. We not only exceeded customers’ expectations for controlling design and development costs but because of our ability to redesign a standard valve, we were able to shorten production times.