Thermal-Fluids and Hydraulics
Kalsi Engineering, Inc. (KEI)™ has extensive background and experience in the fields of thermal-fluids and hydraulics. Areas of specialty in thermal-fluid sciences include inviscid and convection heat transfer, mass transfer, cavitating and flashing flows, viscous flows, laminar and turbulent flows, gas dynamics (low-speed and high-speed compressible flow), and transient/rough flow phenomena that cause oscillatory vibration or buffeting loads. Areas of specialty in hydraulics include water hammer, steam hammer, and steady-state and transient flows in piping systems.
Services
KEI provides a wide range of thermal-fluids and hydraulics related services. Our services range from basic closed-form-solutions based calculations of pressure and flow rates in pipe networks to complex fluid-structure analysis of buffeting loads, transonic and supersonic flow in valves, and flow-induced accelerated wear in valve components due to rough flow conditions. KEI routinely utilizes these skills to support flow testing for globe, gate, butterfly, and ball valves and other piping components. Our staff has extensive experience in the application of computation fluid dynamics (CFD), other computational aerodynamics tools such as potential flow code (or panel code) and boundary layer calculations.
Kalsi Engineering provides the following analytical services:
- Transient modeling of thermal hydraulics with RELAP
- Fluid-structure interaction modeling
- General analyses of incompressible and compressible flow
- Water flow testing under steady-state and transient conditions
- Calculating flow rate and maximum expected differential pressure in piping systems
- Evaluation of fluttering and buffeting loads due to rough flow and vortex shedding
- Convection and radiation heat transfer
- Flow-induced oscillation and pressure/force fluctuations
- Particle-induced erosion
Past Projects
- Evaluation of main steam isolation valve and main steam check valve
- Thermal-Hydraulic modeling of a postulated main steam line break using RELAP
- Fretting/sliding wear due pressure fluctuations generated by vortices shedding
- Assessment of a large butterfly valve experiencing hydrodynamic torque fluctuations
- Hydrodynamic torque in ball and butterfly valves due to incompressible and compressible flow
- Flow-induced side-load forces in Y-pattern globe valves
- Flow-induced side-load forces in cage-guided, T-pattern globe valves
- Vortex-shedding-induced pressure fluctuations in a main steam line affecting safety relief valve pilot seat leakage performance
