Vortex is celebrating 40 years of designing and manufacturing slide gates, diverter valves, iris diaphragms, and loading spouts. The company’s products are used in gravity flow, dilute phase, and dense phase pneumatic conveying applications.
Loren Neil Peterson and his son-in-law, Lee Young, founded the company in 1977 with the patented Vortex Orifice Gate. According to the company, the Orifice Valve was the first valve to be designed specifically for handling dry bulk solid materials.
Since then, Vortex has released more than 20 valve design, which are in use at over 20 000 locations in 80 countries, handling thousands of material types.
The company’s innovations includes the Vortex Titan Series, which since its founding in 2011, has become the fastest-growing product line in Vortex’s portfolio, as result of “rapid growth in the industrial sand and cement industry,” the company said.
The Titan Series features slide gates and diverter valves used in applications that pose excessive wear and abrasion concerns, require extremely large valve sizes, or where special considerations are necessary to ensure a valve’s success in especially harsh environments.
Other milestones of the last four decades include the opening of its UK office in Darlington, which established the company’s business activities in the African, Asian, and European markets. Meanwhile, in 2014, the company’s Kansas headquarters was expanded to a total of 0.185 million ft2.
In February 2013, Vortex acquired PMC Unlimited to add loading spouts to its product offerings. The product line has proven to be a rapidly growing asset to the Vortex portfolio, with its loading spouts now installed on six continents. In spring 2017, Vortex loading spouts gained Zone 20 (internal) and Zone 21 (external) ATEX certification, making them suitable for use in almost any hazardous or non-hazardous environment.