structural optimization for ball valve made of cf8m stainless steel原文.doc

Structural optimization for ball valve made of CF8M stainless steel Xue-Guan SONG, Seung-Gyu KIM, Seok-Heum BAEK, Young-Chul PARK Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dong-A University, Busan 604-714, Korea Received 2 March 2009; accepted 30 May 2009 Abstract: The mechanical and chemical properties of CF8M were studied through experiments. An application of CF8M in valve body was analyzed by using finite element method(FEM) to evaluate the structural safety. An optimization containing several variables based on the response surface method(RSM) was conducted to find the optimum dimension of the valve. The results show that using this process can save valve mass as well as the computational expense effectively. Key words: ball valve/CF8M stainless steel/ trade-off method/ response surface method/ optimization 1 Introduction Ball valve has been used widely in various industries. It is opened by turning a handle attached to a ball inside the valve. The ball has a hole or port through the middle, so that when the port is in line with both ends of the valve, the flow will occur. When the valve is closed, the hole is perpendicular to the ends of the valve,and the flow is blocked. The ball valves are durable and usually work to achieve perfect shut-off even after years of disuse.In the past, it was difficult to investigate details of the flow inside a ball valve, because it was not transparent. This difficulty also blocked the comprehension and improvement of ball valves. Along with the development of computer technique, the visualizations of flow pattern and fluid-structure interaction analysis become easier and easier. Many researches have studied the flow inside a ball valve. KERH et al[1] utilized the finite element method to simulate transient interaction of fluid and structure in a control valve. MERATI et al[2] adopted a commercial package, FLUENTTM, to investigate the flow around a V-sector ball valve. DAVIS and STEWART[3] adopted FLUENTTM to study the flows i