A Valve Terminal That Lives in the Hazardous Area

Festo has announced that its VTUG-EX valve terminal extends fieldbus Ethernet connectivity directly into Class I, Division 2 hazardous locations — which sounds like a component update and is really a change to how a section of plant gets wired.

The problem it addresses is familiar to anyone who has built pneumatics into a hazardous area. Valve terminals have traditionally lived in cabinets in a distant safe location, with individual tubing and wiring runs going out to the actuators. Those runs are long, and their length costs three times over: installation and commissioning labour, slower actuator response as air travels further, and a maintenance and expansion story where adding one valve means pulling more cable across a plant.

Putting the terminal in the hazardous area collapses that. VTUG-EX supports EtherNet/IP, PROFINET and PROFIBUS through interchangeable bus nodes and connects directly to an IO-Link master, so a single network cable replaces the multicore run. The terminal takes up to 24 valve stations — equivalent to up to 48 solenoid coils — with flow to 630 litres per minute, or 22 CFM, and supports hot-swap valve replacement, multiple pressure zones and panel-mounted installation. Certification covers UL Class I, Division 2 and IECEx, which matters for anyone specifying one design across sites in different regulatory regions.

The hot-swap capability deserves a note of its own. In a Division 2 area, the work permit and gas-test procedure around opening an enclosure is often more expensive than the part being replaced, so being able to change a valve without disturbing the rest of the manifold is not a convenience feature — it is what determines whether maintenance happens during a run or waits for a shutdown.

Festo names hydrogen, chemical and refining as target applications, which is a reasonable reading of where this matters. Hydrogen in particular is generating new plant at sites whose engineers have not previously had to think in terms of area classification, and every one of those projects needs pneumatics somewhere.

The company also notes it designs, builds, assembles, tests and certifies complete control cabinets for hazardous and non-hazardous areas, delivered ready to install, and says customers have reduced control cabinet costs by up to fifty per cent by sourcing the cabinet and its automation components from one supplier. That figure is a vendor claim rather than an audited result, and the honest version of it is that consolidating a cabinet build removes an integration step and the ambiguity about who certifies the assembly — which is often where the real cost sat.