Seat Tightness of Flexible Metal Seal of Butterfly Valve at Cryogenic Temperatures

For the development of butterfly valves used in liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels, the seat tightness is one of the important factors to be taken into account in the valve-design process. An O-ring-type metal seal with a retaining ring showing good seat tightness at cryogenic temperatures has been widely used, despite the high manufacturing costs involved. As an alternative, a flexible solid metal seal offers not only sufficient tightness of the butterfly valve, meeting specification requirements, but also relatively low manufacturing costs. In this study, a design criterion to ensure the seat tightness of the butterfly valve using the flexible solid metal seal is proposed. The contact pressure can be calculated by the simulation of the frictional contact behavior between the surface of the metal seal and the valve disc. The geometry of the flexible solid metal seal is determined so that it satisfies the design criterion for sufficient seat tightness, and is verified by experiments according to BS6755 and BS6364.