OPTIMIZATION OF VALVE DISC USING ORTHOGONAL ARRAY AND KRIGING MODEL

Abstract

A butterfly valve is a type of flow control device, typically used to regulate a fluid flowing. Currently, FEA is often used to predict the safety in the design of valve disc. Also, the study about the affection of butterfly valve’s disc to the valve flow characteristics by using CFD has been done by many researchers. Along with the development of computer technique, design and analysis of computer experiments has becoming more and more important in engineering design and optimization. Hereinto Kriging model is one popular analysis approach for the purpose of creating a cheap “meta‐model” as a surrogate to a computationally expensive simulation model. In this paper, the numerical analysis considered the strength, pressure loss coefficient and weight of valve disc simultaneously is investigated to improve the shape of a traditional butterfly valve disc. Firstly, an initial model of butterfly valve is made to evaluate the performance of the valve disc by using CFD and FEM. Then several experiments with different variables combination of the valve disc are conducted by mean of orthogonal array. Finally, the Kriging model is used to find the optimum variables combination of valve disc based on the result of computer experiments. In addition, the optimum result is verified by FEA and CFD simulation again. The result shows that compared with traditional computer experiments, optimization by using Kriging model can improve the weight of the valve disc very effectively in a short time.