Customer Brief: Velan Valve

Imperial Oil, an important customer to the Velan Valve Corporation, needed a forged globe valve with a high flow coefficient and they needed it fast.

Immediately Stan Isbitsky, senior engineering manager at Velan, installed the recently-purchased CFdesign and went to work within Pro/ENGINEER. To increase the valve's flow coefficient, Isbitsky says they experimented with a wishbone-shaped outlet as opposed to having a single bore on the centerplane of the valve. Once CFdesign confirmed a promising valve design, they machined and flow-tested a physical prototype. "We were within a few percentage points of the calculated pressure drop predicted by CFdesign," says Isbitsky.

CFdesign's parametric relationship with native Pro/ENGINEER assemblies and automatic meshing features saved the engineers at Velan valuable design time. "I didn't have to do anything special in terms of meshing; I just specified a single mesh parameter for the volume, and let the automatic meshing work," says Isbitsky

Using CFdesign to test out valve designs early in the process also helped them substantially improve the design. According to Isbitsky the traditional design process would have been based more on intuition than science.

By using CFdesign upfront, Isbitsky says they were able to try out several different scenarios, identify what was working and then use physical prototyping simply as a final verification tool, reducing the product development cycle by 6 weeks.

"CFdesign easily paid for itself on this first project," says Isbitsky.