Cavitation commonly occurred in hydraulic components is generally regarded as harmful phenomena in the hydraulic control systems, because the collapse of the cavitation bubbles could induce the vibration, noise and some times even corrupt severely the surface of the elements. Motivated by a desire to suppress cavitation induced noise in hydraulic control valve, the objective of this work is to study the inception of the cavitation and to evaluate the effects of internal structure of the valve on cavitation intensity as well as cavitation noise. In the presented paper, the computational fluid dynamics and flow visualization approaches are used to obtain static pressure distributions and cavitation images in the channel of the main stage of the relief valve. The predicted low-pressure regions and gas volume fraction of cavitation agree well with the observed cavitation areas. The noise level from the traditional and optimized internal structures of the relief valves are tested and compared.
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