Design for Additive Manufacturing: Valves Without Moving Parts

Abstract

This work presents an innovative design method to obtain valves without moving parts that can be built using additive manufacturing and applied to gas turbines. Additive manufacturing offers more flexibility than traditional manufacturing methods, which implies less constraints on the manufacture of engineering parts and it is possible to build complex geometries like the Tesla valve. The Tesla valve is a duct that shows a diodicity behavior: it allows a fluid to flow in one direction with lower losses than in the other one. Unfortunately the design of the Tesla valve is two dimensional and it relies on the designer experience to obtain good performance. The method presented here allows the automatic generation of valves similar to the Tesla one, obtained automatically by a topology optimization algorithm. It is the first time that a three dimensional method is presented, the available algorithms in the open literature works in two dimensions. A fluid sedimentation process enables the creation of a new geometry optimized to meet a prescribed set of performance, such as pressure losses. The steepest descent method is used to approximate the integrals met during the calculation process. The optimizer is used to obtain three dimensional geometries for different multi-objective functions. The geometry is compared to an existing similar solution proposed in the open literature and validated. The results are compared to a Tesla valve to show the performance of the optimized geometries. The advantage of the proposed solution is the possibility to apply the design method with any spatial constraints and for a wide range of mass flow.