Currently, valve manufacturers are lack of innovation in China, impeding the development of valve industry. Nowadays, many valve manufacturers innovate less after introducing advanced technology. When overseas clients visit China’s heavy industry projects such as power and petroleum, they find that amount of valve products are just modified on the basis of prototype designed in the Western. China’s valve industry has low design level. Although key manufacturers have particular conditions for research and development, most of valve manufacturers have the limitation of talents and facilities, lacking of sufficient funds and sealing development and technical service ability. Valve manufacturers develop valve products based on the sales order and the demands in market with simple performance.
China’s valve design level still has large gap between developed countries and processing technology is also backward though some manufacturers have modern equipments to realize automatic operation, or even dwarfing manufacturer from the Western. Many valve manufacturers have poor foundry equipments. When manufacturing valves made of steel, iron, aluminum, copper and composites, large number of cast steel, cast iron and other materials is wasted with poor environmental because of backward foundry technology during production.
Nowadays, most of
valve manufacturers still can not analyze seismic performance of valves effectively by themselves and they have to authorize design designing institute to carry out seismic analysis. Only a few manufacturers master stress calculation, seismic analysis, fatigue analysis and impact analysis completely, which restricts the development of R&D ability. And designing institutes in colleges only put forward technical requirements for function and characteristics of valves although they have departments for valves. They do not research about manufacturing valves. For that, valve products are usually short of manufacturability or not be suited to application because of some key components lacking of reality testing. For that, valves have low technical level in China.
Foreign valve manufacturers having high technical level are equipped with particular R&D centers. Compared with manufacturers in China, they have abundant funds, various related research institute and excellent engineers. Otherwise, those R&D centers have technical laboratories and testing organizations for different demands. Application software used for developing valve products is also complete. The software can analyze or predict advanced performance of new products or technology by analysis and also can also verify predict outcomes by testing, verifying the validity of analytical method according to statistical data at the same time to obtain s series of effective analytical methods for performance and characteristics of valves. Using the methods to develop follow-up valve technology can reduce R&D cost and the research results are more effective.
Large numbers of patents are only utility patents and have low technical content although they are national patents. Some patens are just partial improvement on structure without materiality and some even imitate or plagiarize others. Otherwise customers still use conventional valve products for several years. For that, internal and external structure of some products has never been improved materially.
