Numerical Analysis on Cavitation Erosion of a High Pressure Differential Control Valve

Abstract

The numerical simulation on the cavitation erosion of a high pressure differential control valve is conducted. The characteristic of cavitation flow is obtained by using full cavitation model and RNG k-ε turbulence model with actual operational conditions and fluid physical parameters. Results showed that: the flow velocity increases rapidly as the fluid passes through the gap between the valve spool and seat. Simultaneously the local static pressure decreases below the saturation pressure of the fluid, then the cavitation is formed. For the convergent - expansion structure, the flow separation occurs due to the pressure recovery, which leads to the formation of recirculation zone, where the cavitation cloud appears. The increases of fluid temperature and inlet pressure or the decreases of valve spool angle and valve opening result in the enlargement of cavitation area and enhancement of cavitation intensity. The numerical simulation results correlate well with actual failure morphologies, which proves that the method can be successfully applied in the cavitation prediction of a high pressure differential control valve.

Cavitation characteristics and energy loss in high-pressure differential control valve

“…The high-pressure differential control valve (Zheng et al, 2016a(Zheng et al, , 2016b(Zheng et al, , 2016c is located between the high-temperature high-pressure separator and the high-temperature medium-HFF 33,10 pressure separator, playing the role of adjusting the liquid level height and throttling and reducing pressure. The outlet pressure of the high-temperature and high-pressure separator is about 18 MPa, and the inlet pressure of the high-temperature and medium-pressure separator is about 3.22 MPa.…”

“…In the early stages of operation of the high-pressure differential control valve, the valve opening range is 40%-60% (Zheng et al, 2016a(Zheng et al, , 2016b(Zheng et al, , 2016cZhang et al, 2022). With the increase of operating time, the damage of the valve core will lead to a decrease in the flow resistance, and the opening of the valve will continue to decrease to maintain the stability of the outlet flow.…”

“…Many works have been done to understand the cavitation flow state in the valve (Zheng et al, 2016a(Zheng et al, , 2016b(Zheng et al, , 2016cQu et al, 2015;Han et al, 2022;Liang et al, 2016) and to obtain the cavitation flow characteristics (Lu et al, 2016). Based on the numerical simulation, Jazi and Rahimzadeh (2009) tried to use two different methods, namely, feature map (Yi et al, 2016;Lv et al, 2018) and acoustic measurement (Zhang et al, 2020;Sha et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2023), to study the development of cavitation in the globe valve, and the results were able to predict whether cavitation occurred in the valve.…”

Cavitation characteristics and suppression of pilot stage two-dimensional valve

“…The use of an inverted circle, appropriate sealing cone angle, and inverted cone hole results in enhanced anticavitation performance for the control valve 8 . An increase in the inlet pressure leads to greater cavitation strength in the valve [9][10][11][12] . Cavitation mainly occurs near the cutoff valve seat for small openings and downstream of the valve disk for large openings and high ow rates 13 .…”