WGE Senior Hydraulic Engineer, Dr Houman Tamaddon is preparing a white paper on the effects of pressure reduction valve (PRV) stations subjected to very high water pressure. This is in response to industry demands for taller buildings with reduced plant space. WGE are involved in numerous projects where pressures are expected to exceed 1800KPa and there is a need to “test” the system prior to commission. The performance test, with collaboration from our Acoustics team will measure the performance of PRV’s at high and low flows and the noise generated from these systems.
In conjunction with suppliers and manufactures, our team will set up a test rig and report the outcomes of these results. Dr Houman says the main objective is to investigate the reliability of the existing pressure reduction setups within medium to high pressure reduction ratios and/or improve their operation by fine-tuning/re-arranging the conventional setups.
PRVs have been used as pressure regulation devices for a long time to make sure the pressure does not exceed the maximum permissible value. While the conventional arrangements of the pressure reduction stations perform reasonably within the low-medium pressure ranges (up to 1000 kPa) there are some concerns regarding their capabilities and performance at higher pressures.
As a rule of thumb every 10m increase in the height of the building will result in a 100kPa increase in the main water reticulation runs in the building. Special attention is required to deal with the increasing pressure in the main pipework once the pressure exceeds the “comfort zone” of the pressure reduction stations to prevent any unwanted noise/vibration/whistle in different working conditions. Whilst the trend towards taller high rise buildings is emerging as a current issue, to date there are no comprehensive studies to diagnose or prescribe a solution and current practice relies on experience or trial and error which fails in many cases.
This study will focus on two main subjects. Firstly, we investigate the comfort zone of the available products in the market in the conventional arrangements to document the working conditions in which the current setups will operate smoothly without experiencing any excessive level of noise/vibration. The second part of the study will focus on the Dual Stage Pressure Reduction arrangement which we developed in-house. This study incorporates bespoke pressure reduction valves developed by Caleffi for this specific study. The results will indicate if the concept is capable of performing under higher pressure levels (up to 1800 kPa) where the conventional methods fail to perform efficiently.
