Flow Control Valve Modeling in Italy

The use of CAE techniques to understand and improve valve design is gaining acceptance worldwide. Two leading Italian valve manufacturers, Walvoil S.p.A. and Petrovalves S.r.l., have been using FLUENT to model their equipment. Using GAMBIT for preprocessing and FLUENT for flow solutions, they have successfully analyzed:

• Complex valve geometries parametrically,
• A range of gas and liquid physical properties,
• Compressible and incompressible flow regimes, and
• A range of low and high pressure drops.

As an added advantage, all of this was accomplished within industry relevant timescales.

Natural Gas Pressure Relief Valve

Petrovalves S.r.l. used FLUENT to model one of their cage-type relief valves common to the oil & gas industry. This valve typically loses 700 bars across it from inlet to outlet. The key to an accurate CFD simulation, in this case, is to use a hybrid mesh created in GAMBIT. This captures the large range of lengthscales in the geometry and, in particular, the detailed flow through the many small nozzles in the cage. Good agreement with experimental measurements was established and regions of complex recirculating flow and high energy dissipation were identified.

Flow pathlines in a pressure relief valve cage colored by local velocity magnitude

Hydraulic Oil Valve

In this simulation, carried out by Walvoil S.p.A., the goal was to control oil flows through multiple valve inlets and outlets. GAMBIT’s journal file capability as well as its ability to apply different meshing strategies permitted detailed flow field resolution in the complex internal channels of the valve. A key benefit in this study was the ability to parameterize geometries and examine various inlet/ outlet permutations quickly. Extruding the domain via prismatic elements also proved to be a flexible option for valve design engineers.

Parameterized geometries

Flow pathlines in a multiport hydraulic oil valve colored by local velocity magnitude

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