Development of Steam Chest With Valve for Steam Extraction in Cogeneration

Cogeneration has been identified as a key technical solution to improve environment, by reducing the impact of global climate change and reducing local emissions, such as particulates, sulphur and nitrogen oxides. In cogeneration, a certain pressure of steam has to be extracted from steam turbine. A mechanical device shall be used to maintain the pressure of the extracted steam. In this paper a new steam chest with valve used for cogeneration which is installed in the steam flow is introduced. Different amount of steam extractions need different valve openings. In order to obtain these several valve openings in typical operating conditions, CFD-program is used to simulate the flow path in the steam chest. The pressure distribution on the surface of valve disc can be calculated through CFD method, and corresponding steady aerodynamic forces and torques can be calculated by integral. Pulsatile flow will change the forces and moments acting on the valve discs with time constantly. Frequency spectrograms of the aerodynamic forces are obtained by using the fast Fourier transforms and compared to the characteristic frequencies of the valve disc obtained by mode analysis. For the purpose of validating the accuracy of CFD model, a test with test model scale of 1:5 has been designed. In the test, the pressure distribution on the valve disc surface and the flow field in the steam chest are acquired respectively by the method PSP (Pressure-Sensitive Paint) and PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry). CFD calculations and experimental results have been compared and it is shown that CFD calculations using K-ε turbulence model has satisfactory precision to calculate the pressure distribution, flow field and the torques.