Numerical research of cavitation surge in a valve - cylinder control system

This paper focuses on cavitation surge in spool valves with the aim of revealing the surge effects upon hydraulic system. A simplified hydraulic system was proposed and modeled to characterize spool valve's function in hydraulic system. Then a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was built in order to describe cavitation behaviors occurred in spool valve. The system model and CFD model were combined by UDF which is a custom defined boundary condition in present paper. The results obtained from the simulation revealed that the discharge behind the spool valve wasn't constant but changed with time periodically because of the surging cavitation. And the piston displacement was also fluctuated which could cause operating unsteady and deserves consideration in designing high performance hydraulic system.