Engineering of combined valve flow for power conversion system

A computational and experimental study is presented on the combined control and stop valve for power plant turbine system. Combined Airflow Regulation Analysis (CARA) and Combined Airflow Regulation Operation (CARO) are performed to check on hydrodynamic characteristic, which is represented by flow coefficient characteristic, of the control valve in the combined configuration. Air is selected as working fluid in the CARO test. Based on CARA and CARO results, a computational analysis on typical steam turbine system was performed to show the benefit of combined valve compared to the conventional separated stop valve and control valve configuration. The results show that the combined valve turbine system performance is observed to improve over the conventional one. The combined valve is found to not only reduce the pressure loss but also shrink the footprint of the turbine system. The CARA and CARO results can be utilized in the fusion reactor system as well as fission reactor system plus any other power conversion systems.