Probabilistic Design and Safety-Constrained Optimization of a Firewater-Powered Portable Valve Actuation System

Manuscript (with Supplementary Information, cover letter and a ChemRxiv copy) prepared for the Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering. Almost every hazardous facility owns a pressurized, regularly inspected source of hydraulic power, its firewater system. This computational study asks whether a portable water-hydraulic valve operator driven through a fire hose can stroke seized or stiff valves without overloading the stem or taking the water that firefighting needs, and which design and operating rules make that likely. A Monte Carlo model with an explicit hydraulic circuit, motor leakage, start-up efficiency, a relief valve and the pressure surge on stall (200,000 draws; every added mechanism can be switched off so that the concept-stage model is recovered exactly) is used, with a safe-stroke criterion, a firefighting-reserve model and a safety-constrained multi-objective optimization that is re-evaluated out of sample and under deliberately wrong input distributions. All input distributions are assumed priors for a concept-stage study; the results are simulation outputs, not measurements, and the model is verified numerically, not validated physically. Code, tests and results: https://github.com/sandlerleon/hydratorque-firewater-valve-actuation-mc