Modelling of a safety relief valve through a MATLAB-Simulink and CFD based approach

The aim of the work is to understand the proper way to address the design and optimization procedures of a hydraulic safety relief valve. These valves are a part of the hydraulic circuit of many aircraft models, so their performances must be adapted to the specific system or engine. The only real constraints are the geometrical dimensions and the need to limit the weight of the device. This work requires gathering all the possible information available in the literature, and condensing them in a set of operations that will allow to promptly manufacture a product fitting the requirements needed. This should lead to the reduction of the amount of physical prototypes needed to obtain testing devices. The process studied uses a numerical fluid dynamic calculation approach to define the pressure field inside the valve and the forces acting on it, together with a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) calculation used to identify the force distribution inside the valve. The first step deals with the creation of a CAD model of the valve. Then the CAD is imported into the CFD software, which evaluates the pressure field required to calculate the forces acting on the poppet of the valve. After the numerical scheme has been calibrated, some investigations are done to reduce the computational cost: the final goal is to run a complete simulation (meshing and solving) on a standard (even if high-end) laptop or desktop PC. Some of the positions (i.e. strokes) of the valve have been simulated as static, so a steady-state condition has been applied to solve the motion field. The main result consists of creating a MATLAB-Simulink® model capable to reach results comparable to that obtained by the CFD simulation, but in faster times. This means relying on a first-guess instrument, capable to address an initial design geometry. The further use of the Look-Up Tables (LUTs) increases the time required to obtain a solution, but links the Simulink model to the CFD simulation in order to reduce the amount of modeled quantities in favor of a greater precision of the model.