EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2010
CAE Technologies for Industry

Non return valve unsteady CFD analysis

Forno Ferdinando - CFD Engineering (Italy)

Abstract

The following study is about the design of a swing check valve and has been performed by means of fluid dynamics simulations by CFD Engineering S.r.l. in behalf of Petrolvalves S.r.l.
The aim of this analysis is to assess the mutual interaction between the motion of the valve flap and the conditions of the fluid where it is dipped. The valve angular motion depends from the surrounding pressure field and, for this reason, it is focused on the characterization of the pressure-position bond and on the consequent non-stationarities.
The design developed with the numerical code ANSYS Fluent™ has been divided into two basic phases:

• Determination of the valve balance position in a specific working condition and evaluation of the corresponding total pressure losses in the main flow;
• Assessment of speed and angular accelerations, at which the valve completely closes, from a determined balance position, as a consequence of a rapid upstream blowdown.

Two 3D non-stationary simulations that rebuild the pressure field with the classic Navier-Stokes equations have been performed. In addition, each temporal iteration is integrated with an equation describing the valve motion dynamics: in this way, once the couple acting on the valve flap is determined and the correspondent instantaneous angular acceleration value is assessed the conditions for the next iteration can be finally defined.