A CFD analysis of the flow dynamics of a directly-operated safety relief valve

A three-dimensional numerical study on steady state was designed for a safety relief valve using several openings and inlet pressures. The ANSYS-CFX® commercial code was used as a CFD tool to obtain several properties using dry saturated steam revised by IAPWS-IF97. Mass flow and discharge coefficient calculated from simulations are compared to the ASME 2011a Section 1 standard. The model presented constant behavior for opening lifts smaller than 12 mm and is very reasonable when compared to the standard (ASME). In addition, the conventional procedure to design normal disc force assumes that all the fluid mechanical energy was converted into work; however, the CFD simulations showed that average normal disc force is about 19% lower than theoretical ASME force, which could prevent the valve oversizing. A numerical validation was conducted for a transonic air flow through a converging-diverging diffuser geometry to verify the solver's ability to capture the position and intensity of a shockwave: the results showed good agreement with the benchmark experiments.