Experimental and numerical 3D study of flow-sound interaction in a steam-line gate valve

Piping systems conveying gases at high pressure often generate high level of vibration and noise. These phenomena, in many cases, are initiated by the coupling between an unstable separated flow and an acoustic mode of the piping system. Various types of cavities in pipe flow are among the flow geometries which are known to be liable to the generation of tonal noise. Flow over cavities in ducts and piping systems has been investigated extensively for two and three dimensional situations. In this case, the feedback loop which generates the tonal noise is caused by the coupling between the instability of the shear layer forming at the cavity opening and an acoustic mode. This paper presents a study of tonal noise generation by subsonic pipe flows over a cavity formed inside a fully open gate valve. Previous 2D and 3D studies, presented in a companion paper, have shown that the presence of the valve-seat cavity is responsible for the generation of acoustic tonal noise. In this paper, the full 3D geometry of the valve, on a small scale model, is studied with experiments and using an unsteady compressible flow solver developed at EDF. Experimentally, the evolution of the fluid acoustic coupling in term of frequency and amplitude with the flow velocity is studied. Also, a modal analysis have been done to identify the frequency of acoustic mode of the valve. Numerically, the complex 3D geometry is meshed and computation is performed. The results show an acoustic tonal noise in a frequency range compatible with that experimentally. The study is underway, future analysis of the velocity and acoustic fields in the simulation may help to identify the shear layer and acoustic modes and to identify how they couple together. (authors)