Numerical Simulation of Flow Field in Firing Valve for Underwater Launch System Based on Fluent/Simulink

The firing valve is the important device in underwater torpedo launch system. The mass flow rate of gas through the valve determines the interior trajectory of torpedo and transient characteristic of the launch system. A new simulation method is proposed in this paper, which combines three-dimensional compressible flow equations for governing the gas flow in the valve and one-dimensional ordinary differential equations for governing the thermodynamics of air bottle and cylinder. Simulation is performed using the co-simulation method which couples the commercially available computational fluid dynamics(CFD) software FLUENT and one-dimensional dynamic simulation software Simulink together. The mass flow rate values computed by the CFD simulation coincide well with the analytical ones, which validates the simulation method. The results may facilitate the further research of the flow-induced vibration and aerodynamic noise of the launch system.