Comparisons of CFD and Traditional Solutions for Steam Hammer Events

Sudden pressure changes in the piping system of power plants are inevitable, and thus potential serious damage to large components, piping system, and piping supports is possible. To protect valuable components from such events, abrupt valve closure is employed to restrict the flow and prevent significant incidents and the resulting plant downtime. Unfortunately, when a valve is suddenly closed to prevent damage caused by unexpected events, a pressure wave within the flow is created, which travels upstream and impacts at the pipeline elbows. These events, involving sudden changes in pressure, are known as steam hammer. This steam hammer pressure wave, traveling through the pipe system, is capable of producing significant transient loads and stresses, which can disrupt the piping supports. As such there is a need for further investigation. The pressure wave depends on the characteristics of the flow, valve closure time, the elbow-to-elbow pipe section lengths, and the piping system flexibility. The present study performs a CFD analysis of the fluid experiencing such a sudden pressure change. OpenFOAM is used for this analysis and considers all the flow parameters, valve closure time, and critical length of the straight pipe. The study intends to provide a means of calculating the transient steam hammer loads applied on the pipe elbows, which consequently allows appropriate pipe support selection based upon the resulting peak loads. This computational analysis is compared to analytical methods for peak load determination such as rigid column theory, the Joukowsky method, and the steam hammer method explained by Coccio (1967) and Goodling (1989).