Introduction

Buttery valves are commonly used in industrial applications to control the internal ow of both
compressible and incompressible uids. A buttery valve typically consists of a metal disc formed
around a central shaft, which acts as its axis of rotation. As the valve's opening angle, _, is
increased from 0_ (fully closed) to 90_ (fully open), uid is able to more readily ow past the
valve. Buttery valves must be able to withstand the stresses and forces that results from high
Reynolds number ows. Characterizing a valve's performance factors, such as pressure drop,
hydrodynamic torque, ow coe_cient, loss coe_cient, and torque coe_cient, is necessary for uid
system designers to account for system requirements to properly operate the valve and
prevent permanent damage from occurring to the valve.

This study seeks to compare a 48-inch buttery valve's experimental performance factors to
those obtained using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and to assess the feasibility of using
CFD to predict performance factors of buttery valves.

Buttery Valve Attributes

Many buttery valves have asymmetrical features and thus their direction of installation,
commonly referred to as a seating direction, typically affect the valve's flow characteristics.
Buttery valves can be installed in one of two directions: seated upstream and seated
downstream. Seated upstream signifies that the valve seat, where the valve sealso off flow
when fully closed, is upstream of the valve disk shaft or axis of rotation. Seated downstream
signifies that the valve seat is downstream of the valve disk shaft or axis of rotation. A layout of
the buttery valve for the present configuration (seated downstream) and opening angle
definition, 𝜃, can be seen in Fig. 1.1. The port diameter of a seated downstream buttery valve
is de_ned as the diameter of the main valve body as it leaves the main valve body and enters
into the pipe diameter in which it is installed. Figure 1.2 further shows the main features and
components of the buttery valve used in this paper.

Components that are considered dynamic and move with the rotation of the main disk body
are the following listed in Fig. 1.2: bottom and top shaft, rubber seal, seal ring retainer, and
retainer bolts. The rest are static components. Epoxy bonds the seating ring onto the main
valve body. The top and bottom sleeves help secure their corresponding shafts to the main
valve and disc body. The rubber seal is fastened tight onto the main disc body by means of the
seal ring retainer and corresponding bolts. The rubber seal ensures a tightly closed valve when
fully closed.
Figure 1. Cross-section of a 48-inch buttery valve installed in a pipeline in the seated
downstream position and open at an angle, 𝜃 .

Buttery Valve Performance Factors

Characterizing a buttery valve typically involves evaluating the most common performance
factors such as: pressure drop across the valve, hydrodynamic torque, ow coefficient, loss
coefficient, and the torque coefficient. These performance factor standards have been widely
published by Bosserman and AWWA [19] and will be described in subsequent paragraphs.

1.3.1 Pressure Loss

Pressure loss across a valve is often attributed to disruptions caused in the ow field such as
obstruction, ow separation and mixing. For buttery valves, pressure losses vary depending on
the disk angle configuration,𝜃, and ow rate, 𝑄. The pressure loss is represented by the
absolute pressure differential between the measured pressure upstream, 𝑃𝑢𝜃 and the
measured pressure downstream, 𝑃𝑑𝜃 , as given in Eqn. 1.1 below:

∆𝑃𝜃 = 𝑃𝑢𝜃 − 𝑃𝑑𝜃