Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Quick Closing Buffer Performance of Steam Turbine Admission Valve

One of the main functions of the steam turbine admission valve is to provide a very fast closing to intercept the supply of mass flow rapidly from the steam entering the turbine and cause destructive overspeed. In order to quickly close the admission valve, at the beginning of the stroke the moving parts of the valve should be accelerated to a high speed; when the stroke ends, a lot of kinetic energy is converted to impact energy. To prevent damage to valve parts, a quick closing buffer system is required to absorb the most of the impact energy. The quick closing buffer system plays an important role in the admission valve as an influencing factor of the dynamic characteristics of the valve. In the past, considering the complex internal structure, the research about quick closing buffer system relied on confirmatory experimental study or analytic method to get a quick closing buffer process. This paper focus on the quick closing process of a high pressure steam admission valve of Shanghai Turbine Plant. The dynamic characteristic of the quick closing buffer system is investigated by means of method of CFD numerical simulation for the first time, in order to find a more convenient and effective way to get the key factors that affect the dynamic characteristics, and the accuracy of the of CFD numerical simulation is verified by test, which are valuable for building an accurate dynamic characteristic analysis model of steam turbine admission valve.