JungWoo Choi

ME4043W
ASME Journal of Pressure Vessel Technology
Instability of Pressure Relief Valves in Water Pipes
P. Moussou et al.

Summary

The main idea of the article is to find the behavior of pressure relief valve when the inlet

pressure is slightly higher than the maximum allowable working pressure. For a background

information, the pressure relief valve relieves over-pressure due to the extreme situation in which

the pressure rises above the allowable pressure in the storage. It protects the storage from

catastrophic scenarios such as fire condition where the kinetic energies of the gas molecules or

liquid molecules are rapidly increased. The ideal pressure relief valve is supposed to fully

opened right away when the inlet pressure exceeds the allowable pressure as if a light bulb is

either turned on or turned off by an on/off switch. However, in real life, most of pressure relief

valve is operated by a spring. The valve lift is attached to the spring. The spring force keeps the

pressure relief valve closed while the inlet pressure is below the allowable pressure. The pressure

relief valve is opened when the inlet pressure is higher than the allowable pressure as the spring

compressed and the valve lift is released. When the inlet pressure is slightly higher than the

allowable pressure, the pressure relief valve cannot be fully opened due to the spring force. The

inlet pressure has not exceeded the spring force so that the pressure relief valve cannot be fully

opened. The article calls these states in two ways: static instability and dynamic instability. The

static instability is basically that the pressure relief valve is somewhat opened in a static state

such as a half-closed door, and the dynamic instability is a state where the pressure relief valve is
oscillating between the opened state and closed state as if someone vigorously flapping the door

back and forth.

A water tank is installed 20m higher than where the pressure relief valve is installed so

that the water can flow from upstream to downstream. A pressure sensor for measuring inlet

pressure, a force sensor for measuring spring force, and a displacement sensor are attached to the

pressure relief valve for measuring the location of the valve lift. The allowable pressure is at 30

bar, and inlet pressure is varied from 20 bar to 35 bar. The valve modeling equation is taken as

below:

mẌ = −kX + F𝑠𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 + Fℎ𝑦𝑑 − mg

Eq. 1 valve modeling equation

where m is the mass of the valve lift, x is the displacement of the spring, g is the gravity, k is the

spring coefficient, F_spring as a residual spring force at X=0, and F_hyd is the hydrodynamic

force. For static stability analysis, the hydrodynamic force is determined by surface area function

and pressure drop coefficient. The spring force and hydrodynamic force are estimated by fifth-

degree polynomial functions. The valve starts to open when the tank pressure is at 31.7 bars, and

it fully closed at 34.6 bars. The upstream pressure drop has not affected the stability of the valve

lift, and a slight change in the inlet pressure

Most of the cases are in steady condition, but some cases show that the valve lift

oscillates as the time goes by. Instead of using pressure value as a parameter, a frequency is used

to determine dynamic stability. Equation 1 is modified in terms of circular frequency on the

valve lift. There is a certain frequency range on the valve lift that leads to negative pressure drop

in the valve lift. This generates a negative damping effect and causes instability of the valve lift.
Critique

In general, I really liked the tone of the writing. It was really organized and well written. I could

understand most of the context, except for some negative damping effects, which seem like

complicated concepts. Some of the explanations are lacks in detail such as Figure 9 in the article.

I was not sure how the slopes of the fluid force and slopes of the spring force are almost equal.

Maybe it is lack of my understanding of the topic. Introduction to the article explained well

enough so that the reader could know why this study is important. The article also gave some

basic idea of how the pressure valve works. The article provided a schematic of the whole

system for the experiment, which was helpful to understand the materials better.

The graphs and computer-generated images were also helpful to understand what is going

on. It would have been nice if the article explained the derivation of some equation, especially

for dynamic instability section. It was hard to understand why the function has been through a lot

of changes. Overall, it was well written article. It explained the hard concepts in easy words.