Analysis And Research On Flow Resistance And Cavitation Characteristics Of V-Port Ball Valve

As a control element in the pipeline,the valve has the characteristics of huge number,wide application,high reliability,high economic benefit,low fluid resistance,good sealing performance,fast opening and closing speed,etc.It is widely used in not only general industrial pipelines,but also petrochemical,water conservancy and hydropower,aerospace industry and so on.The flow characteristics have a significant impact on the reliability and practicability of the valve.Hence,it is quite important to study the valve flow behaviors.V-port ball valve is widely used in energy transportation,chemical and pharmaceutical industries,which is a commonly used regulating valve.In this paper,V-port ball valve with 60° conical angle is taken as the object,and ANSYS-Fluent software is used to simulate the inner flow situation,whose results are deeply investigated.The main contents are as follows:(1)Establish the model: Solidworks is applied to three-dimensionally model V-port ball valve and the flow path of the V-port ball valve with a 60° cone angle and ICEM is used to mesh the models with different opening degrees.Then,V-port ball valve is simulated in Fluent.(2)Analysis of flow resistance characteristics: the V-port ball valve is numerically calculated with different structures,and it is concluded that the flow resistance factor increases with the decrease of relative opening,while the flow coefficient decreases with it.(3)Analysis of cavitation characteristics: the cavitation number increases first with the increase of the opening degree.When the opening degree is large,there is a downward trend as a whole.The volume fraction of cavitation decreases rapidly from 10° to 20°,but a small increase occurs at 90°.Therefore,under a constant pressure difference,the valve is prone to cavitation at small and large openings.The cavitation bubble is basically distributed at the inlet of the spool and at the cone angle.The pressure difference affects the cavitation characteristics in the valve,and the bubbles number will decrease when differential pressure increase.(4)Structural optimization: on the premise of ensuring the performance of the valve,the spool structure is optimized.The ball valve is optimized by means of radian transition,and the cavitation volume fraction in the optimized structure valve is reduced,which is the optimization of the ball valve for reference.