Analysis and optimization of a butterfly valve disc

Abstract

A butterfly valve is a type of flow control device, which is widely used to regulate a fluid flowing through a section of pipe. Currently, analyses and optimization are of special important in the design and usage of butterfly valves. For the analysis, finite element method (FEM) is often used to predict the safety of valve disc, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is commonly used to study the flow characteristics of valve. However, it is difficult to obtain accurate results for the optimization of butterfly valve due to the high non-linearities. For this reason, metamodels or surrogate model methods are extensively employed. This paper integrates metamodel with FEM and CFD analysis to optimize a traditional butterfly valve, where the weight of the valve disc is the design objective, and the strength safety of disc and the pressure loss coefficient of valve are constraints. Kriging model is employed as a surrogate model to formulate the objectives and constrains, and the orthogonal array is used as design of experiment to sample the computer analysis. The optimum results with the corresponding variable combinations for the valve disc are obtained easily by this method. Moreover, the structural and fluid analyses with the obtained optimum variable combinations are conducted again to verify the accuracy of the optimization method. The results demonstrate the capability and potential of this method, which integrates the Kriging model with FEM and CFD analysis, in solving the optimization of a butterfly valve.

Optimization of the structure of water axial piston pump and cavitation of plunger cavity based on the Kriging model

“…It has the statistical characteristics of smoothing effect and estimate of minimum variance. It has played an important role in linear geological statistics [18][19][20].…”

Criterion for non-interference of solid metal seal pair in double-offset butterfly valve

“…As growing number of butterfly valves are required in various application fields, valves of higher quality are also demanded for. In order to improve the performances of butterfly valves, increasing studies have been carried out, focusing on several hot topics, including the flow characteristics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], contact pressure distribution [8], cavitation phenomenon [9][10][11], pressure loss [1,2,5,7,12,13], as well as drive characteristics [6,14,15]. All these studies have brought insights for the design of butterfly valves and contributed to the development of butterfly valve industry.…”

“…For example, Park et al [7] promoted a novel design process for structural optimization of the valve by considering both the flow characteristics and structural safety and reported that the mass reduction of the valve body could be achieved while enhancing the flow characteristics and maintaining the original stiffness. Park et al [12,13] proposed a multidisciplinary optimization method for butterfly valves, in which simplification is applied to approximate the highly complicated objective and constraint functions involved in the design problem by constructing a surrogate model of pressure loss coefficient and maximum stress. Aiming to solve the interference problem of seal pair in triple-offset butterfly valve, Kan et al [16] promoted a mathematical model to estimate the interference of seal pair and discussed the influences of the structure parameters on the interference property.…”

“…The sole aim of the present model is to solve the problem of fluid leakage at the sealing surface in DOBV by reducing the interference of the sealing pair; other aims such as light weight, high strength, and low pressure loss of valve are not considered in this paper. For detailed studies on the valve optimization considering such objectives, one may refer to the researches by Park et al [12,13]. With less practical constraints considered, the model can be readily used to judge whether interference may occur at the sealing surface of a DOBV, while avoiding solving a multidisciplinary or multi-objective optimization problem.…”

Design of a tortuous path trim for a high-pressure turbine bypass valve

“…To consider aspects of fluid dynamics and confirm structural safety in design processes, CFD and FEM techniques are used to predict flow fields and to check stress and strain information on the valve [7,8]. However, little has been reported about the design process or performance tests in the field for valves used at power plants.…”