Sealing Optimization of a Nuclear Spring-Loaded Safety Valve Based on the E-AHF Ensemble Surrogate Model

Abstract

Safety valves are widely used in nuclear and other types of power plants and their sealing ability is of great importance for the safety and reliability of the overall power plant. For mechanism exploration and design optimization purpose, an Extended adaptive hybrid Functions (E-AHF) model based optimization is performed in this paper. For surrogate model development, a total of five disk parameters were defined and considered as the design variables, and maximizing the valve sealing performance was set as the objective. With the five design variables, Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) based design of experiments (DoE) were carried out, with which different Finite Element Method (FEM) numerical model were developed to calculate the contact tress between the valve disk and valve nozzle, thereby the E-AHF ensemble surrogate mode was constructed to establish the relationship between the design variables and the valve sealing performance. Based on the developed surrogate model, valve design optimization was performed with the help of the multidisciplinary optimization platform named Data-driven Design Optimization System (DADOS). Finally, an optimal valve design scheme was obtained, which can not only maximize the sealing ability of the safety valve, but also ensure the valve fatigue life. For the results verification purpose, an additional FEM simulation was performed and the results were compared with those produced by optimization, and a good agreement was obtained, confirming the feasibility of the design optimization method used in this paper.