Unsteady cavitation flow characteristics of rotary reversing valve

WU Wan-rong, DING Yuan-gen
(College of Mechatronics and Electrical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China)

Abstract: Aiming at the problems that the cavitation of rotary reversing valve will cause noise , performance deterioration and even lead to affect the performance of the hydraulic vibration system, the unsteady cavitation flow characteristics of rotary reversing valve were studied. A threedimensional model of the valve port was built by SolidWorks software. Its grids was divided and boundary conditions were set by ICEM software prior to implementing the simulation. The mathematical models of the flow field were built, which combined RNG turbulence model and Mixture cavitation model in the Fluent software, the valve cavitation flow was numerically simulated by the sliding mesh technique. The trend of pressure field, velocity field and cavitation distribution of rotary reversing valve under different opening degrees were explored. The results indicate that the degree of opening will affect the distribution of pressure field and velocity field at the valve port ,and the valve spool is prone to vortex, and the change of opening will affect the size of the vortex. The distribution of the cavitation area will also change with the opening of the valve. The maximum gas volume fraction increases with the inlet pressure and the spool rotational speeds increases, and decreases as the back pressure increases.
Key words: rotary reversing valve; cavitation flow; sliding mesh; numerical simulation