Butterfly valve performance factors using the multiphysics object oriented simulation environment

Abstract

Butterfly valves are typically used in nuclear reactors to control incompressible fluid flow with high inlet velocities. Performance factors for butterfly valves include the pressure drop across the valve and the loss coefficient from which hydrodynamic torque and flow coefficients can be computed. This work explores a computational fluid dynamics approach for butterfly valve performance factors using the open-source Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework. While MOOSE is often used in the nuclear energy modeling and simulation community for simulations ranging from fuel characterization to heat pipe simulation, this work employs the MOOSE open-source Navier–Stokes solver capability for simulating butterfly valve performance factors and compares those to experimentally measured results from the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory at Reynolds numbers in the order of $10^6$ for the partially opened configuration. The MOOSE framework results are compared against experimentally measured butterfly valve performance factors across five valve opening angles using meshes with order $10^4$ – $10^5$ elements. This validation serves to enable MOOSE-based multiphysics simulations incorporating the open-source Navier–Stokes module.