Investigation of the Flow and Cavitation in a Butterfly Valve

Since knowledge on hydrodynamic torque of a butterfly valve is very important for butterfly valve design, its hydrodynamic torque is investigated in this paper. In reality, the investigation of the loss coefficient and torque from some experiments will take a long time and a lot of money. This paper presents a statistical study of the flow past the butterfly valve in a static analysis using commercial fluid dynamics software fluent. The simulation was done for 16 different positions of the valve disk including 0°, 5°,10°, 15°, 20°, 30°, 35°, 45°, 50°, 55°, 65°, 70°, 75° and 80°. The value of pressure in the pressure inlet was set to be 16 bars. The study focuses on the investigation of the characteristics of loss coefficient, torque behavior and flow field of the 262 mm butterfly valve. The results show that the loss coefficient is directly dependent on the position of the valve disk and by increasing the angle of the valve disk the value of loss coefficient increases and the value of torque increases until about 10°-20° and then decreases. By comparing between the experimental and statistical data, acceptable relationships were observed.