This device may be used as a valve or as an adjustable restriction orifice that allows control the fluid flow in a pipe.
The benefits of this device are:
It has an incipient cavitation coefficient very close to 1 (1.05) that lets to get very high pressure drops without cavitation.
The construction simplicity.
Actually in the market there are different devices to control the flow by throttling, as the globe, butterfly or ball valves and the restriction orifices, but all of them have incipient cavitation coefficients much more greater than 1. Only it´s possible to approach to 1 with very sophisticated and expensive valves that divide the flow in many streams.
So the rotary perforated disc EMA-1 may compete with these special valves when it´s necessary to control the flow creating a high pressure drop and could be applied in all type of installations with flow pipe systems as power plants, refineries, petrochemical plants, water distribution, etc.
This design combines 2 hydraulic models, one is the flow through the perforated disc plate and the other the flow through the disc edge, that is similar to the flow through a butterfly valve. The combination of the 2 types of flow get a global extremely low cavitation coefficient.
This design may be manufactured as the butterfly valves, raplacing its blind disc by the perforated disc, so the production cost will be similar to that of the butterfly valves.
Finally, two prototypes of this design are running gently in the fire water system of a spanish nuclear power plant. They have a pressure drop grater than 9 kg/cm2 with a water flow of 125 m3/h, discharging the water to the atmospheric pressure without cavitation, noise nor vibrations.