A Comprehensive Heat Transfer Study Inside a Steam Turbine Valve: Experiment, Numerical Simulation and Simplified Model

In a steam turbine system, one of the main factors limiting the operational flexibility is the thermal stress associated with a high temperature gradient within the control valves, which often leads to structural damage during frequent start-up and shut-down cycles. One possible solution is to utilize an electric heating system with appropriate insulation to decrease the warm-up time. Here, an experiment and a numerical simulation were performed using a scaled turbine valve equipped with an electric heating system to understand the heat transfer process. The experiment was conducted at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and had a duration of 100 hours, including three heating-cooling cycles and two heat preservation states. The simulation, which used the commercial software Ansys Fluent 2019 R1 with the finite volume method, was performed to model the experimental heat transfer process. The simulated results showed less than 10% deviation from the measured temperatures. To further improve the computing efficiency, a simplified model based on the lumped parameter method was proposed and validated. This model can predict the valve temperature in less than 1 minute and showed good agreement for all of the studied cases. The ability of the simplified model to simulate the valve heating-cooling cycles at a high efficiency could accelerate the thermal design process to improve the operational flexibility of steam turbines in the future.