IMI’s Smart High-Performance Positioner: Closing the gap in valve diagnostics

The idea behind predictive maintenance is simple enough: identify developing issues before they become failures, allowing interventions to be planned during scheduled plant shutdowns. This helps save time, reduce costs, and increase reliability while ensuring continuity of operations.

Despite advances in smart positioner technology, however, many maintenance teams still find themselves reacting to problems rather than preventing them. This is not due to a lack of data. Modern control valves and positioners generate a continuous stream of metrics, providing businesses with more insight than ever.

But as many operators will recognise, having access to data does not necessarily lead to better maintenance decisions. The real challenge is turning information into actionable insights that maintenance teams can trust and act upon with confidence. This is where IMI's Smart High-Performance Positioner (SHP) is closing the gap.

Valve diagnostics have become much more sophisticated over the past two decades. When a warning appears, maintenance teams still need to judge whether it signals a minor issue that can wait or a developing fault that could take an asset offline. An engineer will then usually inspect the equipment to identify a root cause, if there is one.

It’s an effective workflow, and many facilities still rely on it. However, timing the response can be difficult. Acting too soon may lead to unnecessary maintenance and added costs, while waiting too long risks poor reliability and avoidable disruption. Data goes some way to making the correct call, but it’s not a solution on its own.

The real challenge, in my view, is not generating more data but giving businesses greater confidence in the information they already have. This is not a conclusion I have reached by making assumptions. Rather, it was a recurring theme that emerged from detailed conversations with customers who were already using an earlier version of our ‘smart’ positioner technology.

Users recognised the value of their existing assets. However, many still felt there was a gap between what was being brought to their attention and the implementation of a genuinely predictive maintenance regime.

Better visibility into valve condition, earlier warnings, and troubleshooting tools that enable faster, more straightforward decision-making were all requirements I discussed with our customers regularly. And this was a frequent topic for discussion because the sheer volume of available diagnostic data created more work for maintenance teams.

This level of intimate customer feedback proved essential to the development of the SHP, which seeks to provide deeper insights into valve behaviour and operating conditions. Take friction monitoring as an example. Friction monitoring remains one of the clearest indicators of serious valve degradation, signalling issues such as wear, erosion, or misalignment. Catching it early is essential in order to avoid major outages or process performance issues, enabling better planning for future plant turnarounds.

IMI’s SHP technology incorporates advanced diagnostic capabilities, including valve signature and step-response tests, enabling maintenance teams to accurately assess valve and control system performance over time. These offline diagnostic tools automatically generate comprehensive reports that can be archived, compared with previous test results, and shared with specialists for further analysis.

It’s precisely by providing a consistent record of asset performance throughout its lifecycle that the SHP makes it easier to identify emerging trends, detect degradation earlier, and build a more complete understanding of valve health.

Beyond offline diagnostics, the SHP continuously monitors valve performance during operation and records behaviour when predefined events occur. Operators benefit from an intuitive alarm management system that provides immediate visibility of the device's operational status.

Clearly identifiable symbols and prioritised alerts help maintenance personnel quickly distinguish advisory notifications from critical conditions. This enables the rapid assessment of your plant’s status without the need to interpret large volumes of raw data.

The integrated local user interface (LUI) further simplifies day-to-day maintenance activities. Operating parameters can be reviewed directly on the device without connecting external tools. Meanwhile, alarm lists and calibration wizards help technicians diagnose issues and restore optimal performance more efficiently.

IMI’s SHP technology also maintains a series of operational counters that provide valuable insights into equipment utilisation throughout its service life. Parameters such as total operating time, accumulated actuator travel, and the number of changes in direction of movement can be continuously monitored. Together with cycle counting, these indicators provide an additional layer of information that can help maintenance teams assess valve condition and support condition-based maintenance strategies.

To support root cause investigations, the positioner stores operational event logs in its internal memory, recording when alarms occur and when they are cleared. This creates a valuable link between events observed on the distributed control system (DCS) and in the actual behaviour of the valve assembly. It helps engineers better understand process disturbances and equipment responses.

For more detailed investigations, the SHP features a data recorder tool that captures a complete set of operational parameters upon a predefined trigger event. This functionality effectively freezes the full set of operating conditions before and after the exact moment an issue develops. So, the SHP can provide engineers with the information they will need to perform highly effective troubleshooting.

Rather than relying on assumptions or recreating operational conditions, your maintenance teams and our engineers can analyse precisely what happened and why. In safety-critical applications, the SHP also supports partial stroke testing (PST), allowing emergency shutdown valves to be tested regularly without requiring a full valve closure. By verifying the safety loop's functionality through controlled partial movements, potential issues can be identified and corrected before they compromise safety integrity or system availability.

Taken together, these capabilities transform diagnostic data into actionable information. By using complete-stroke analyses, event-driven recordings, operational counters and advanced diagnostic testing, your maintenance teams gain a more complete picture of asset performance over time. Trends can therefore be identified long before they develop into operational problems, making it easier to plan interventions, optimise maintenance resources and improve plant reliability.

Effective maintenance programmes are rarely, if ever, defined by the volume of asset data collected. The key is giving operators the ability to generate actionable insights. Better-informed decisions ultimately allow teams to focus their maintenance effort where it’s needed, making more of each planned outage.

Along with good flow-control principles and innovative valve design, this capability will play an increasingly important role as facilities seek higher levels of reliability and efficiency from their installed base. In an industry already rich in data, new technologies risk contributing to the same problem they’re trying to solve. This is why product development must always begin with real-world customer challenges. From the outset, our team focused on how this latest positioner could shape and expedite decisions rather than complicate them.

The SHP reflects IMI’s approach: turning advanced engineering and real-world customer insight into technology that helps operators make faster, more confident maintenance decisions.

Discover more about our Smart High-Performance Positioner.

Matteo Canova is Technical Sales Director for IMI STI.