Cooling water valves

[Anonymous]

We have InterApp Desponia wafer type butterfly valves installed in our cooling water system.  Our expectation is that these valves should be able to isolate cooling water from the engine, so that we can drain the engine cooling water and perform maintenance.  During the initial filling of the cooling water system, the valves leaked and the engine was unintentionally filled with cooling water.  The Wartsila rep said the valve was not aligned properly and that the valve handle was broken, which prevented the valve from sealing completely.  We are going to check if they still leak after aligning them and installing new handles.

Do other users have these valves installed?  What has been your experience?  Is it common for them to leak?  Is there a different valve that Wartsila has supplied for this application?

Thanks for your feedback,

Mike Muhly

[Anonymous]

We have a few units that leak cooling water past the butterfly valves.  If we are going to have a cyl head off for a while, we drain the radiator and engine together to prevent flooding the engine with coolant.  We haven’t changed any valves, as it is a manageable problem.  Our best practice is to have two 2×4 boards cut-to-length that hold steady pressure on a closed valve handle.  The handle locks are broken on some of ours, and the boards hold them tighter anyway.

[Anonymous]

Same issues here, same results. My Supervisor, Bob O’Neill, found an alternative, (with replaceable gaskets) from:

https://www.bray.com/products/butterfly-valves

We are using the Series 30, 6 inch.

We replace them during either the 18,000hr or the 24,000hr Maintenance Interval.

[Anonymous]

We had one of our engines leak into another via the common maintenance tank fill and drain loops.  We had the engine we were to work on drained and isolated.   Pulled a prechamber valve and water started pouring in to the cylinder.  We were looking for the source then an operator crawled up to check expansion tank levels and an engine two down from the one we were working on had lost all of its coolant.  I am supposing that the head pressue was enough to push past a bad seat or maybe even a improperly installed valve.  Still trying to determine which valve is leaking.

[Anonymous]

The valves that come with the engine are some of the poorest quality valves I have ever seen. We are replacing the isolation valves with the Bray valves which have a wafer thickness that matches the DIN dimension of the OEM valves. This makes the swap out an easy project. The Bray valves seat well and will stay in the position that you need and not float because of vibration. The cost of the valves is very reasonable 4″, DIN 100 is $150.00. We have 4″ through 8″ valves as replacements.

[Author]

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