Fluid-Structure Interaction Analysis on Pressure-Compensating Emitters

Abstract

<abstract><title><italic>Abstract. </italic></title> Pressure-compensating (PC) emitters can maintain a constant discharge within a wide range of working pressures, thus they have extensive application prospect in mountain regions where the hydraulic pressure in irrigation systems often changes greatly. Although the rapid design method for non-PC emitters based on CFD is quite mature at present, common CFD method is not suitable for the design of PC emitters because a two-way coupling interaction exists between the fluid flow and elastic diaphragm. In order to improve the design accuracy and efficiency of PC emitters, the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis was studied in this paper. In the FSI analysis procedure, adaptive mesh repair was adopted to refine the distorted fluid mesh. Incremental method and displacement-pressure finite element formula were used for the nonlinear analysis of the incompressible material. In this article, SST K-ω turbulence model was used for the fluid analysis, while contact analysis method and Neo-Hookean Mooney-Rivlin rubber material model were adopted for the structure analysis. The results showed that the discharge was adjusted by a very small deformation of the diaphragm to reach a steady state. At last, compared with the test results carried out using the test samples made by rapid prototyping, the analyzed values were a little larger while the maximum relative deviation was within 2.5%. This verified that PC emitter’s discharge could be predicted by FSI analysis accurately. In conclusion, FSI analysis is an efficient way to improve the design accuracy and reduce the test times for PC emitters.