An Experimental Study on the Force Coefficient and the Discharge Coefficient of a Safety Valve in Air-water Mixture Flow

Due to the low number of experimental investigations on the sizing of safety valves in multiphase flow, a novel set of measurement data of an air-water mixture is reported. This paper presents an experimental study on three different geometries of safety valves, a poppet valve with jet angle θ = 120°, and two-disc valves with deflection angles θ = 0° and θ = 90°, respectively. Our test rig comprises a pipeline with 42.5 mm inner diameter, spray nozzles to supply the added water quality (water mass fraction) to the pressurized airflow up to 40 % mass fraction and an inlet pressure up to 6.6 bar(g). The time histories of force, valve lift, and pressures were recorded. We present correlation data for the force coefficient and the discharge coefficient. The widely used omega technique for the Homogenous Equilibrium Model (HEM) is employed to predict the theoretical mass flux. The results show that the poppet valve experiences less momentum force and lower mass flow rates compared to disc valves, while the disc valve with deflection angle θ = 90° presents the highest discharged flow rates among the tested geometries. Our most important finding is that up to 60 % relative valve lift and 40 % mass fraction, neither the force nor the discharge coefficient changes significantly compared to the pure-air case. Finally, we propose a new correlation with a single equation for the resultant force and the discharge coefficient as a function of the relative valve lift for all tested water mass fractions.