• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.5
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• pp.1835-1844
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• 2022

Single-orifice plate is wildly utilized in the piping system of the nuclear power plant to throttle and depressurize the fluid of the pipeline. The cavitation induced by the single-orifice plate may cause some serious vibration of the pipeline. This study aims to find the optimal designs of the single-orifice plates that may have weak cavitation possibilities. For this purpose, a new single-orifice plate with a convergent-flat-divergent hole was modeled, a multi-objective optimization method was proposed to optimize the shape of a single-orifice plate, while computational fluid dynamics method was adopted to obtain the fluid physical quantities. The reciprocal cavitation number and the developmental integral were treated as cavitation indexes (e.g., objectives for the optimization algorithm). Two non-dominant designs ultimately achieved illustrated obvious reduction in the cavitation indexes at a Reynolds number Re = 1 ×10⁵ defined based on fluid velocity. Besides, the sensitivity analysis and temperature effects were also performed. The results indicated that the convergent angle of the single-orifice plate dominants the cavitation behavior globally. The optimal designs of single-orifice plates result in lower downstream jet areas and lower upstream pressure. For a constant Reynolds number, the higher temperature of liquid water, the easier it is to undergo cavitation. Whereas there is a diametric phenomenon for a constant fluid velocity. Moreover, the regression models were carried out to establish the mathematical relation between temperature and cavitation indexes.