Valves are the workhorses of process and hybrid manufacturing processes. These valves directly interact with the flow and are subject to wear and tear over time. It’s important to understand their health to avoid unplanned downtime, reliability issues, and quality issues that may arise.
Jaime Alvarado Millan joins me to discuss the Plantweb Insight™ Valve Health Application and how it provides diagnostics to better plan maintenance activities and avoid abnormal plant conditions.
Give the podcast a listen, and visit the Valve Health Application page on Emerson.com to learn how it empowers you to make better maintenance decisions with more information, improving the reliability and performance of your plant.
Transcript
Jim: Hi everyone, I’m Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Today, I’m joined by Emerson’s Jaime Alvarado Millan to discuss ways to drive greater performance and control valve reliability. Welcome to the podcast, Jaime.
Jaime: Hi, Jim. Thank you for the invitation. I am glad to be here and excited to talk about the Valve Health application.
Jim: We’re excited to have you. Can you share a little bit of your background with our listeners?
Jaime: Yeah, for sure. I have more than seven years of experience in technology companies, working with predictive models and advanced forecasting analytics. I have worked in companies focused on financial services, as well as enterprise software. And I am currently part of Fisher Control Valves in the instruments business unit.
Jim: That’s great background. So what are control valves, and why are they important in controlling a process?
Jaime: Sure. And thank you for that question, Jim. So control valves are really the heart of the control loop. So they are the final element that takes all the decisions made by control strategy and turns them into a physical action, regulating a flow, pressure, temperature, or any critical process variable. And that is why they are so important. If the valve doesn’t respond properly, the entire plant feels it. So, it impacts quality, throughput, energy efficiency, and of course, safety. A plant can have great sensors and great controllers, but if the valve doesn’t move the way the system expects, the process becomes unstable. And that instability has operational costs and risks we all want to avoid.
Jim: Jaime, what are some of the challenges that can occur during the life of a control valve, and how do they affect the process?
Jaime: So over time, a valve experiences natural wear, like friction, pneumatic issues, misalignment, elastomer degradation, and changing process condition. Each of those issues creates symptoms that often go unnoticed. The problem is that these symptoms eventually lead to variability, loss of controls, alarms, and sometimes unplanned shutdowns. And as we all know, an unplanned shutdown can be extremely expensive. On top of that, maintenance teams today are often smaller and expertise has high turnover. That makes early detection even harder. And that challenge is exactly what we are addressing with the Valve Scale application.
Jim: That sounds very high stakes, everything from affecting maybe the quality of what you’re producing all the way to unplanned shutdowns. That’s not good. How can customers address these issues and help improve valve performance and prevent valve failures?
Jaime: The Valve Health application transforms data from the positioner into actionable information. The software captures two types of alerts. One, native alerts from the positioner, and two, analytics-generated alerts from our own algorithms that detect patterns and abnormal conditions. With that information, we calculate a valve scale index, and we assign each valve a repair urgency level. Red for high urgency, yellow for medium urgency, and green when the valve is in good condition. Most importantly, the application doesn’t just show the symptom. We explain what it means, how it impacts the process, and what action we recommend. And we provide a suggested time frame to take action. This allows main teams to plan weeks or even months ahead, avoid emergencies, and prioritize work in a very objective way.
Jim: Well, that sounds like having that information to be able to plan ahead and maybe avoid some of those bad things that can happen is good. But don’t we as Emerson already provide similar tools to this?
Jaime: Yes, and that is actually one of our strengths. The Valve Health application doesn’t replace other tools. It complements them as part of the valve reliability suite. For example, ValveLink is excellent for deep diagnostics when you have in-house expertise. Valve Condition Monitoring includes support from Emerson experts. And, the Valve Health application is that continuous, automated, scalable software solution. It’s designed for plants that need 24/7 visibility, even without dedicated specialists. The software does the heavy lifting. It analyzes, prioritizes, and alerts. In short, it democratizes expert-level insight.
Jim: Yeah, it sounds like it embeds some of that expertise that some of the experts have with the other packages. That sounds pretty powerful. What capabilities does the Valve Health app offer maintenance, reliability, and operations that are different from other solutions in the market?
Jaime: There are several unique capabilities, but I would highlight three. First, the advanced analytics. The software doesn’t just collect data. It interprets vast conditions and estimates the real impact on performance. Second, our new elastomer degradation prognostic algorithm, released in November 2025, it estimates how much useful life remains before the elastomer begins affecting valve performance. This allows users to plan a replacement before a failure occurs. It’s a complete shift from reactive to predictive. And 3rd, intelligent prioritization. Our dynamic dashboard shows a bad condition in red, yellow, and green, so grouped by plant location. It also offers fully customizable e-mail notifications where the user defines their own rules. All of this helps plants operate with less friction, less uncertainty, and far more confidence in their daily prioritization.
Jim: Wow, that’s pretty powerful, being able to get those alerts to the right people instantly to plan the next steps and what they need to do. That is a very predictive approach to things. How does the Valve Health app connect into a plant’s network?
Jaime: The integration is secure and straightforward. We connect in read-only mode, which means we don’t change or influence anything in the plant. There are three possible pathways. One, AMS Device Manager, two, wireless connections, and three, OPC UA, which works with almost any modern architecture. This allows sites to scale from a single area to multiple areas without introducing risk to the control system or requiring infrastructure changes.
Jim: That sounds like not only the information that you can get from it is powerful, but just the way you can integrate it into your automation architecture and get the information where it needs to go, and then read-only in a very secure way. That’s really good. Let’s start winding things down. Is there anything else that you want to share that we haven’t already covered?
Jaime: Yes. Every plant today is facing the same challenge, doing more with less. Smaller teams, retiring experts, and increasing pressure on reliability and safety. The Valve Health application helps directly with that. The software runs 24/7, constantly analyzing data and only asks for attention when something truly matters. And all this structured contextualized data is ideal for feeding Industrial AI applications now or in the future. We are not only solving today’s problems, we are building the foundation for predictive maintenance over the next decade.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point of surfacing the data that’s within those valves and making it available throughout the automation architecture, especially as artificial intelligence comes along. It’s got this breadth of data coming from the control valves, which, you know, are a critical part of plants. That’s a real excellent point you make there. Where can our listeners go to learn more about these tools and how they help improve control valve lifecycle performance?
Jaime: You can visit Emerson.com/ValveHealthApp or reach out to your authorized Emerson representative. We are happy to share demos, real-world examples, and best practices for implementation.
Jim: And I’ll add a link to the URL you gave right there in the transcript of this podcast for our listeners to easily access that area. Well, Jaime, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise with our listeners.
Jaime: Thank you very much, Jim. It was a pleasure for me.
-End of transcript-
