A Study of the Sealing Performance of a New High-Pressure Cone Valve for Deep-Sea Gas-Tight Water Samplers

Abstract

The cone valve plays an important role in high-pressure sealing applications. In this paper, a new high-pressure cone valve, based on the titanium alloy poppet-to-polyetheretherketone seat sealing structure, is proposed for deep-sea gas-tight water samplers. In order to study the sealing performance of the new valve, both the conforming poppet-seat contact model and the nonconforming poppet-seat contact model were evaluated. Finite element analysis based on the two models was performed and validated by experiments. The results indicate that the nonconforming poppet-seat contact model has a better sealing performance than the conforming poppet-seat contact model. The new cone valve also was applied in a gas-tight hydrothermal fluid sampler and successfully tested in a sea trial during the KNOX18RR cruise from 9 July to 12 August 2008.