1. Setting the facility

1. Make sure that the fan is not running, so there is no flow in the facility.
2. Verify that the data acquisition system (Figure 4(A)) follows the schematic in figure 2B.
   1. Connect the positive port of pressure transducer #1 (see figure 2B for reference) to the pressure tap upstream of the valve ().
   2. Leave the negative port of the pressure transducer #1 open to the room conditions (receiver:). Hence, the reading of this transducer will be directly .
   3. Connect the positive port of pressure transducer #2 (see figure 2B for reference) to the plenum pressure tap ().
   4. Connect the negative port of pressure transducer #2 (see figure 2B for reference) to the pressure tap upstream of the valve (). Hence, the reading of this transducer will be directly, as required by equation (10).
3. Make sure that the virtual channel 0 in the data acquisition system (Figure 4(B)) corresponds to pressure transducer #1 () and the virtual channel 1 corresponds to pressure transducer #2 ().
4. Set the data acquisition system to sample at a rate of 100 Hz for a total of 500 samples (i.e. 5s of data).

Table 1. Basic parameters for experimental study.

Figure 4. Flow facility. (A): view of plenum discharge into the receiver section before installing the set of valves to be studied. (B): three different kind of valves inside the receiver. From left to right: gate valve, globe valve, butterfly valve. (C): exit ports from the receiver. The valves discharge the flow inside the receiver, and the fan sucks the flow out of the receiver through the perforated plate in the picture. Please click here to view a larger version of this figure.

2. Measurements

1. Record the diameter of the pipe connected to the valve and calculate its cross-sectional area.
2. Determine the maximum number of full turns of the handle required to move the valve from the fully closed position to the fully open position. If this number is not an integer, exclude the last fractional rotation to simplify this analysis. For the current experiment, the maximum number of full turns is 12.
3. Close the valve completely.
4. Rotate the handle of the valve until it is fully open while counting the number of full turns. For simplicity, use only an integer number of turns for the experiment. For example, it takes approximately 12 turns and 1/3 of a turn to fully open the valve used in this experiment. Hence, we will turn the handle of this valve only 12 full turns from its fully closed position and define that as the initial position ().
5. Turn the flow facility on.
6. Use the data acquisition system to record the readings of and .
7. Enter in table 2 the average values of and obtained with the data acquisition system.
8. Close the valve by 1.5 turns.
9. Repeat steps 2.6 to 2.8 until table 2 is fully populated.
10. Turn the flow facility off.

3. Data Analysis

1. Determine the loss coefficient of the valve for each angular position using equation (5). Enter these values in table 2.
2. Determine the flow rate for each angular position of the valve using equation (10). Enter these values in table 2.
3. Determine the operating point using equation (7). Enter these values in table 2.
4. Calculate the relative difference between the measured flow rate and the operating point
5. Use equation (3) to produce a plot of the system curves for all the values of . Consider the total loss coefficient as .
6. Add the characteristic curve of the fan to this same plot using equation (2).

Table 2. Representative results. Measurements of pressure differences and estimations of flow rate and loss coefficients.