PREDICTION OF FLOW CHARACTERISTICS THROUGH A CIRCULAR PORT OF A SPOOL VALVE USING CFD APPROACH.

Mallikarjuna V Bidari, Mujeebulla Khan Guttal

Abstract: Hydraulic spool valves are used in a variety of industrial equipment’s like earth moving machinery, aircrafts and machine tools etc. A hydraulic spool valve is a switching device used for controlling hydraulic devices. A spool valve can turn the flow of hydraulic fluid from a hydraulic pump to an actuator in forward or reverse directions or on and off by blocking offthe route of the fluid takes. A controller moves the valve back and forth in its case to slide the spools into different positions. As the spool moves across the inlet port, the port which is initially fully open, circular in shape and permitting the fluid flow, is getting closed gradually. Once the spool starts moving, the inlet port becomes non circular and continues to be so till closure. The shape and the area of the port that is still left open for the oil to flow is steadily changing. The area which is originally circular is becoming far away from circularity. It is required to study the flow in such port-spool combination. The purpose of the dissertation is to compute the flow for different port openings. ANSYS CFD FLOTRAN software is used to predict the flow characteristics. The exact flow path is simulated. The predicted results are compared with the analytical calculations.

Keywords: Spool valve, Simulation, Flow Characteristics, CFD

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0212057