Fluid flow in the impulse valve of a hydraulic ram

The paper presents the results of a study investigating the equilibrium of forces acting on the closing element of the impulse valve in a water ram at the end of the acceleration stage. Acceleration is one of the three main stages in the working cycle of a water ram. In the first part of the paper, we estimated water velocity based on our earlier experimental measurements. We also calculated the minimum force required for closing the impulse valve. The second part of the paper discusses two variants of a numerical model, which was developed in ANSYS Fluent to determine the resultant hydrodynamic pressure and, consequently, the forces acting on the head of the impulse valve at the end of the acceleration stage. The main aim of this research was to verify the applicability of numerical modeling in water ram studies. The present study was motivated by the fact that Computational Fluid Dynamics is very rarely applied to water rams. In particular, we have not found any numerical studies related to the equilibrium of forces acting on the closing element of the impulse valve in a water ram.