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Relief Valve Orifice Sizes Share This Page

What is a Relief Valve?

Relief Valves, also called pressure relief valves, are mechanical devices designed to operate if an
over-pressure situation occurs - they are used to safeguard the plant. The relief valve is designed to
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open at a predetermined pressure to protect vessels, tanks and piping systems from experiencing
pressures in excess of their design limits. Generally, they are the last line of defence in protecting
the plant; following on from an Emergency Shutdown (ESD) and operator intervention.
In most countries, industries are legally required to protect pressurised systems by the use of relief
valves.

So what is a Relief Valve orifice?

The American Petroleum Institute (API) has developed a series of inlet size, orifice, outlet size combinations for various
pressure classes of flanged relief valves. These combinations have been widely adopted by engineers throughout the oil
and gas and allied industries.
Central to these combinations are a series of fourteen standard orifice sizes each denoted by a letter ranging from D
through to T. Each letter refers to a specific effective orifice area, as shown below.

What do the orifices denote?

The valve sizing engineer (usually a process or instrument engineer) determines the controlling relieving rate from all
possible scenarios, then the required relief valve orifice size is determined using the appropriate equation given in the API
code. Knowing the required relief valve orifice size, an actual orifice size equal to or greater than the calculated orifice size is
chosen from a the standard range. The maximum flow through this actual orifice will be the valve's capacity.

What are the standard orifice sizes?

The full list of letters and corresponding effective area is shown in the relief valve orifice size chart below:
Technical Library Relief Valve
Terms and
The following pages on Control and Instrumentation.com give more detail on relief valves:
Nomenclature

Further Reading
For those who want to learn more about Relief Valves, then the following books will be of interest:

A Quick Guide to Pressure Relief Pressure Relief Devices: ASME and

Valves (PRVs) API Code Simplified

Guidelines for Pressure Relief and

Effluent Handling Systems

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