Customer Brief: Conval Inc

Conval Clampseal Valves have pressure ratings up to 11,000 psi and temperature ratings up to 1,100° F for use primarily in steam lines at nuclear and other power generating plants. As a private corporation, Conval manages its growth carefully so they agreed to add CFdesign to their digital prototyping toolbox only if they could see a rapid return on investment.

Knowing accurate flow data is mission critical to Conval customers. Chuck Sumner, engineering manager at Conval, first put CFdesign to use when updating the company's product catalog. The original product line had been tested 35 years ago but through the years it expanded to 60 different valve sizes and configurations. "We needed to run about 45 flow tests at a cost of $1500 per test. It was going to cost $60,000 and many months of staff time just to update our catalog," explained Sumner. "With CFdesign we completed this project with a fraction of the time and money required to do it the old-fashioned way. CFdesign paid for itself many times over on the first project"

With the confidence built during the catalog project, Conval engineers felt comfortable using CFdesign upfront in the design process for new products and for troubleshooting.

For example, when a Conval customer contacted them to say one of their pressure reduction valves, a Whisperjet, was not delivering adequate flow in a piping system, Sumner's team quickly built a 3D model of the system in Pro/ENGINEER and launched a flow simulation in CFdesign. "We saw the flow was cavitating, the water was flashing to steam and then condensing back to water." This phenomenon throws traditional flow calculations way off and, according to Sumner; it is not something they would have discovered with traditional troubleshooting methods. After Conval engineers modeled and replicated the customer's cavitation problem in CFdesign they proceeded to develop a modified version of the Whisperjet that solved the problem.