Parametric Study on a Flow through a Gate Valve
OBJECTIVE:
To perform a parametric study on a gate valve model and find out the mass flow rates at 5 design points.
Geometry Model:
The volume was extracted for the inlet flow, outlet flow and the Gate Disc as displayed below. The geometry components like Bottom, Gate Disc, Bonnet, Spindle, Hand Wheel were suppressed for physics. The inlet and outlet were pulled outwards 800mm on both sides.
For the Mesh, the element size was kept to be 145mm and in total, formed to be 493544 no. of elements.
The Pressure Based Steady Solver was used and gravitational acceleration was enabled in negative Z-direction. A Realizable k-epsilon model was been used Scalable wall functions used for Near-Wall Treatment. The reason behind using the k-epsilon model was that the velocity flow was turbulent, which we computed from the inputs with the help of standard model initialization -0.1415488 m/s.
Water liquid was used as a fluid in a fluid volume replacing air which was the default chosen by fluent. For boundary condition, the inlet was set to be as pressure inlet with a total gauge pressure of 10 pascals and turbulent intensity of 5 %.
We ran the calculation for 250 no. of iterations.
Perform a parametric study on the gate valve simulation by setting 5 design points starting from the initial condition of lift with the least value of the mass flow rate.
We obtained the Table for Design Points as follows:
Here is the table of 5 design points with their outlet mass flow rate starting with the lift of Gate Disc from 10mm to 30mm with 5mm of ascending increment.
Note: The '-' (negative) sign indicates the outlet by Ansys Workbench.
DP 0 (10mm lift)
Cut section view for this design points to show the gate disc's lift and adapted fluid volume
The Mass Flow Rate at the Outlet
The Outlet Mass Flow Rate is -0.14718 kg/s
Velocity Contour Animation
DP 1 (15mm lift)
Cut section view for this design points to show the gate disc's lift and adapted fluid volume
The Mass Flow Rate at the Outlet
The Outlet Mass Flow Rate is -0.18693 kg/s.
Velocity Contour Animation
DP 2 (20mm lift)
Cut section view for this design points to show the gate disc's lift and adapted fluid volume
The Mass Flow Rate at the Outlet
The Outlet Mass Flow Rate is -0.23399 kg/s.
Velocity Contour Animation
DP 5 (25mm lift)
Cut section view for this design points to show the gate disc's lift and adapted fluid volume
The Mass Flow Rate at the Outlet
The Outlet Mass Flow Rate is -0.28658 kg/s.
Velocity Contour Animation
DP 6 (30mm lift)
Cut section view for this design points to show the gate disc's lift and adapted fluid volume
The Mass Flow Rate at the Outlet
The Outlet Mass Flow Rate is -1.8563E+42 kg/s.
Velocity Contour Animation
Observation and Conclusion:
The data obtained for Outlet Mass Flow Rate clearly indicates the increase in values as we increase the lift for the Gate Disc.
As we increase the Gate Valve lift, the flow increases and becomes more turbulent in nature which we see through the waves formed in the volume.