Help needed with calculating orifice plate aperture!
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For 1.0 MPa steam in a pipeline with DN20 diameter, it is desired to design an orifice plate such that the pressure drop is 0.9 MPa; in other words, the pressure before the orifice plate is 1.0 MPa and the pressure after it is 0.1 MPa. How can the required diameter of the orifice plate be determined? Thank you all for your advice! I searched online for a long time but still couldn’t figure it out
You should consider it a pressure relief valve, not a orifice plate; calculating the pipe diameter would also work
There is no such orifice plate. The orifice diameter of an orifice plate is fixed; therefore, its pressure drop is necessarily related to the flow rate. The lower the flow rate, the lower the pressure drop for the same orifice diameter ； The same is true in reverse. Incidentally, we generally refer to orifice plates as flow-limiting orifice plates because once the orifice diameter is fixed, there is an upper limit to the flow rate; above this limit, the flow rate hardly increases regardless of the pressure difference. So, what you need is a control valve, not a orifice plate. Or first figure out whether you actually want to limit the flow rate or control the pressure.