Clarkson valves canada

The Clarkson Company: A Division of Tyco International

In 1950, J. R. Clarkson founded a family-owned industrial valve design and manufacturing company in Sparks, Nevada. For almost a half century, the company, known as the Clarkson Company, worked on advancing metal and mineral processing. The Clarkson Company became known for its knife-gate and control valves, introduced in the 1970s, that are able to halt and isolate sections of slurry flow. By the late 1990s, the company had become a key supplier of knife-gate valves, helping to control the flow in many of the piping systems around the world in different industries, including mining, energy, and wastewater treatment.

The knife-gate valve uses a steel gate like a blade that lowers into a slurry flow to create a bubble-tight seal. While conventional metal gates fill with hardened slurry and fail easily thereby requiring high maintenance, Clarkson's design introduced an easily replaceable snap-in elastomer sleeve that is durable, versatile, and handles both high pressure and temperature variation. Pipeline operators value Clarkson's elastomer sleeve because traditional seals have cost between $75 and $500 to replace, and considerable revenue is lost when a slurry system is stopped for maintenance repairs. Clarkson's product lasts longer and is easier to replace.

In the late 1990s, the Clarkson Company was acquired by Tyco Valves & Controls, a division of Tyco International, Ltd. Tyco Valves & Controls, located in Reno, Nevada, and having ISO 9000 certification, continues to produce, market, and distribute products under the Clarkson brand name, including the popular knife-gate valve.

Discussion

1.

The successful Clarkson knife-gate valve contains a wafer that is thin and light. Yet, the wafer is so strong it can operate with up to 150 pounds-per-square-inch (psi) of pressure on it, making it much stronger than those of competing brands. Suppose Tyco engineers have developed a new wafer that is even stronger. They want to set up an experimental design to test the strength of the wafer but they want to conduct the tests under three different temperature conditions, 70°, 110°, and 150°. In addition, suppose Tyco uses two different suppliers (company A and company B) of the synthetic materials that are used to manufacture the wafers. Some wafers are made primarily of raw materials supplied by company A, and some are made primarily of raw materials from company B. Thus, the engineers have set up a 2 × 3 factorial design with temperature and supplier as the independent variables and pressure (measured in psi) as the dependent variable. Data are gathered and are shown here. Analyze the data and discuss the business implications of the findings. If you were conducting the study, what would you report to the engineers?

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