Cavitation and choked flow conditions can occur when high pressure drops are encounters in various type of valves which prevent them to work properly and may cause severe erosion damage inside the valves that decrease their lifetime. Prediction of these critical conditions leads to prevention of critical flow conditions and helps to improve the design of the valve geometries to delay these critical flow conditions. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a powerful tool that can be used to simulate flow conditions and to predict the incipient of cavitation and consequently choked flow in the valve through solving the Time Averaged Navier-Stokes equations under multi-phase flow conditions. Therefore, CFD simulations have been conducted for two types of excess flow valves. Mixture and Eulerian-Eulerian multi-phase flow solution methods, as well as K-e and RSM turbulence methods, have been utilized to solve the behavior of vapor flow inside the valve and simulate cavitation phenomenon. Vapor phase behavior has been also assessed by solving compressible and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Accuracy of CFD simulations were evaluated by comparison of CFD results to experimental data obtained at Total Valve Systems (TVS). It was concluded that although both multiphase flow models with compressible vapor phase were able to predict the variation of Mach number by increasing pressure drop in the expected range, the mixture multiphase flow approach with incompressible vapor phase was selected for further investigation due to simplicity and lower computational cost. Simulated CFD results also indicated a good agreement with available experimental data, which were obtained under lower pressure drop conditions. 


Assessment of Computational Fluid Dynamics for Predicting Possible Cavitation and Choked Flow Inside Excess Flow Valves

Division / Sponsors: 
Heat Transfer Division (HTD), Fluids Engineering Division (FED)

Heat Transfer Summer Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/HT/HT2020/volume/83709

18th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICNMM/ICNMM2020/volume/83693

Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2020/volume/83716

HT-ICNMM2020 - Virtual Conference, SHTC - Virtual Conference, FEDSM2020 - Virtual Conference

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