(Travis S., Jordan V., Richard M., Gerardo M.)
Last Friday we tried to "hard close" GV7, but we only achieved a "soft close" status. After looking at the system that uses instrument air at the gate valve, we did noticed that the solenoid valve to "open" and "close" the gate valve was "leaking" air, lots of instrument air, to fix the air leak we decided to replace the solenoid valve with a new one.
Then when it was time to "hard close" GV7, its pressure regulator broke, we were not able to open the regulator. We ordered a couple of new regulators and should be here on Wednesday. Meanwhile we are going to "hard close" the gate valve using a bottle of nitrogen.
Attached is a photo of the broken regulator, yes the knob is off, but the metal piece within is free floating and not able to do its job.
(Travis S., Jordan V., Richard M., Gerardo M.)
We bypassed the gate valve instrument air regulator and feed bottled air to the gate valve actuation system directly. We continued where we left off, and just continued to apply pressure to the system in an attempt to "hard close" the gate valve, and a second approach was to open the gate valve and close it again.
- We continued to apply pressure were we left off yesterday, we reached and sat at 55 psi for 30 minutes, valve remained "soft closed". We decided to try a different approach since we were loosing air due to leak in gate valve actuation system.
- We opened GV7 back up, then closed it again, we then applied more pressure to the system, this time we reached 60 psi, and left it there until air ran out, about 20 minutes, no change noted or heard on the gate valve.
Leaky sound noted, we did noticed that when we are on the "close" setting, there is lots of hissing sound coming from one of the "relief ports" at the solenoid valve, but when we are on the "open" setting, there is no hissing at the solenoid valve. And if there is is very small.
