Cavitation Noise Reduction Around a Butterfly Valve by Semicircular Fins

Butterfly valves are widely used in industry because of their compactness and simple construction. Many kinds of valves have been proposed to prevent cavitation. However, those valves are fairly expensive and the structures of the valve are complicated. In this paper, the attachment of fins to the valve body is proposed to reduce cavitation noise. The cavitation around the butterfly valve occurs because of the interference of the flow from the nozzle side and the flow from the orifice side. To avoid this interference, semicircular fins were attached to the valve body. From the experimental results, it was confirmed that the attachment of the fins was very effective in reducing the cavitation noise.