Application of flow field decomposition and reconstruction in studying and modeling the characteristics of a cartridge valve

In modeling the characteristics of a cartridge valve with traditional methods, it is commonly required to determine the value of flow area and other coefficients such as discharge coefficient and jet angle, etc. However, these parameters often rely heavily on empirical or experimental data and often involve some uncertainties, especially with the variation of the spool displacement (valve opening). To avoid these uncertainties, this paper proposes a modeling method which calculates spool force and flow rate directly through the distribution of fluid field. Transient 3D flow field simulation with dynamic mesh technique is conducted using commercial code FLUENT, and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) method is introduced to simplify fluid field data. The results showed that the POD method can capture the main features of the fluid field while significantly reducing the amount of data. With reconstructed pressure field and velocity field, spool force and flow rate can be calculated directly without using traditional formulas which contain uncertain coefficients. Valve characteristics calculated with this method agree with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and experimental data well, which confirms the validity and effectiveness of this method.