Pressure Fluctuations Around Steam Control Valve: Steam Experiments and CFD Calculations

In some cases, a steam control valve (figure 1) in a power plant causes large vibrations in piping systems that can be attributed to pressure fluctuations generated in the valve under the partial-valve-opening (middle-opening) condition. For the maintenance and the management of the plant, the valve system needs to be improved to prevent the onset of hydrodynamic instabilities. However, in the case of the steam control valve, it is difficult to understand the flow characteristics in detail experimentally because the flow around the valve has a complex 3D structure and becomes supersonic (M>1). For these reasons, the details of the flow around the valve are not fully understood before, and CFD simulations are required to understand the underlying complex flow structure associated with the valve. In our previous researches, a mechanism of the pressure fluctuations in the middle opening condition, named “rotating pressure fluctuations”, were clarified and a suppression shape were developed by experiments and CFD calculations. However, as we used air as a working fluid in our previous researches instead of steam that is used in the power plant, we couldn’t consider effects of condensation and difference of change of the state quantities between air and steam. In this report, we have conducted steam experiments and CFD calculations by original code to clarify the effects of the difference of the fluids. As a result, in the middle opening condition, we have observed spike-type pressure fluctuations and their rotation in the experiment, and valve-attached flow and local high-pressure region in the CFD result. These results indicate the pressure fluctuations observed in steam experiments and CFDs are the same as rotating pressure fluctuations observced in air researches.