Christopher Marchant is product manager of the Control Valve Group at The Lee Company. Visit The Lee Company at www.theleeco.com.

The evolution of medical equipment has expanded beyond the hospital environment and towards the home care and ambulatory environments, making portable, battery-operated variants of traditional stationary equipment more attractive. In today's culture, the persistent demand for reliable and innovative products compels companies to integrate new and more advanced technology into smaller packages.

A magnetically latched solenoid valve is ideal for reducing power consumption in applications where conventional, higher power valves have been used in the past. This type of design is ideal for compact, battery-powered pneumatic instruments such as portable oxygen delivery systems, environmental gas samplers, and other OEM flow switching devices.

Lee Company's miniature magnetic latching solenoid valve is designed on the 3-way HDI (high density interface) platform and optimized for applications that demand ultra-low power, low heat, and small size. The valve offers reliable bi-stable switching performance and momentary (10 msec maximum) pulses of current to switch its state resulting in a 5.5 milliwatt-sec per switch.