Simulating hydraulic valve pressure drop

CFD software is being used more and more frequently during the design of off-highway systems and components.

The design of valve housings, especially those made of cast iron commonly seen in mobile hydraulics, is one area that could benefit from CFD. For most hydraulic valve designs, estimating pressure loss with an aim to minimize it is always one of the basic goals for a good design. That fact is especially true for valves with cast housings due to significant initial cast tooling investment and relatively long lead time in prototyping.

CFD was introduced at HUSCO in the mid-1990s using the ANSYS multiphysics suite-a commercial software code for general-purpose engineering analysis. Flotran is the CFD module inside the ANSYS family. It is a finite-element-method based code, compared to discretization methods employed by other CFD codes such as the “control volume” method.