LIAO Boquan, HE Qingzhong, WANG Jia, PENG Tao, CHEN Xuefeng, LI Kehong
For the problem of the severe cavitation caused by the water droplet labyrinth regulating valve in the super-(super-) critical unit under high temperature and high pressure conditions, based on the theory of computational fluid dynamics and cavitation mechanism, the standard k-ε turbulence model, Mixture model and Schnerr-Sauer cavitation model were selected to compare the structural performance of the control valves before and after improvement at typical openings in terms of pressure, velocity, gas volume fraction, etc. The calculation results show that the original disc structure has a large pressure drop, up to 19.95 MPa at maximum, and a high flow rate, up to 237 m/s at maximum, which leads to severe cavitation, and the gas phase volume fraction is even as high as 1. The maximum pressure drop in the disc flow passage was reduced by 52.5%, the maximum speed was reduced by 38.8%, and the maximum gas phase volume fraction was reduced to 0.18. It was proved that increasing the cofferdam can effectively control the pressure drop and flow velocity in the valve and reduce the degree of cavitation damage. In addition, appropriately increasing the height of the cofferdam is conducive to suppressing the occurrence of cavitation, but an excessively high height will cause the cavitation area to shift to the cofferdam, and at the same time, an unstable flow field will be formed, which will affect the valve opening and closing characteristics.