CFD study of industrial safety valves in a virtual environment with OpenFOAM® software

Abstract

Numerical advances in the numerical analysis of safety valves have enabled the development of approximated predictions related to the hydraulic behavior of turbulent flows, which influence the mechanical behavior of the main components coupled to the pneumatic system. Therefore, many studies have focused on the numerical analysis of the safety valves responsible for maintaining the system integrity subject to high-pressure values under real working conditions in a virtual and inexpensive environment through the CFD codes application with OpenFOAM software. Therefore, this paper is based on the technological prediction of the laminar or turbulent flows into a safety valve through the solution of the partial differential equations system, which describes the physical state of the pressure and mass flow rate in space and time. IcoFOAM solver has been applied to model the main flow fluctuations taken, considering the mean values of the pneumatic system. A mesh independence study has been used to compute and define the finite number of nodes and cells that discretize the continuous computational domain of the internal flow and generate an approximated numerical prediction of the safety valve performance, maintaining a low computational cost during the iterative solution of the conservation equations developed with computational tools. In this sense, the RANS KEpsilon approach has defined a high prediction of the turbulent flow behavior in a virtual environment with an error rate close to the 2 percent value between the numerical and the experimental models. This research shows a good agreement in the understanding of the physical phenomena with the computational tool application based on advanced theories of thermal and fluid mechanics sciences in a virtual environment.