Numerical Investigations on Intake Tube Design of Micro Kaplan Hydro-Turbine System

Author(s):  
Tarek ElGammal ◽  
Yi-Hsin Yen ◽  
Ryoichi S. Amano ◽  
Joseph Millevolte ◽  
Randal J. Mueller ◽  
...  

In this context, a numerical study was conducted to predict the performance of a small axial Kaplan hydro-turbine of 30 cm diameter that can be manufactured and installed vertically on a low head water level of less than 3 m. As a CFD simulation scheme, Large Eddy Simulation was selected to solve for the variables of turbulent flow due to its high fidelity performance for capturing time-variable turbulence wakes and eddies. Turbine intake tube dimensioning was primarily studied as an affecting element to maximize energy extraction with the set of initial design parameters. The intake tube was tested at six angles (3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 degrees) and four lengths (50, 60, 75, 90 cm). The simulations were performed on a pre-determined water height, one diffuser design, and one set of stator-rotor having a rotational speed of 750 rpm. Maximizing the efficiency of a system with less material cost was the primary goal of the comparative study. After that, bellmouth profile was adopted to find out its influence on the system performance. Outcomes have proven the merit of higher slope per side length in enhancing output power with an average of 2.7 percent by full expansion from minimum to the maximum angle. Moreover, a corresponding marginal efficiency raise was observed by increasing intake slope, while it was found that the system acts poorly with longer intake tubes as both power and efficiency go down. Bellmouth profiles, based on the guidelines of the best straight design, significantly improved system output to reach 81 percent efficiency.

Author(s):  
Ahmad I. Abbas ◽  
Tomoki Sakamoto ◽  
Mandana S. Saravani ◽  
Ryoichi S. Amano ◽  
Joseph Millevolte ◽  
...  

The objective of the paper is to study the design and optimization of Kaplan hydro turbines for very low head (less than 3 meters), with a particular emphasis on the use of rim-drive electrical generators. The work is based on Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of a variety of design parameters for maximum output power and efficiency. Two designs are presented in the paper. One is a 90-cm (35-inch) diameter vertical-oriented Kaplan hydro turbine systems as an intended product capable of generating over 50 kW. The other is a smaller, 7.6-cm (3-inch) diameter horizontal-oriented system for prototyping and laboratory verification. Both are analyzed through CFD based on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of transient turbulence. Certain design for the runner and the stator as well as guide vanes upstream of the turbine were studied to get the most from the available head. The intent is to use 3D-printing manufacturing techniques, which may offer original design opportunities as well as the possibility of turbine and water conduit design customization as a function of the head and flow available from a specific site.


2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahram Derakhshan ◽  
Nemat Kasaeian

Micro hydropower station is one of the clean choices for offgrid points with available hydropotential. The challenging in this type of energy production is the high capital cost of the installed capacity that is worse for low-head micro hydropower stations. Turbine price is the main problem for this type of energy production. In this research, a simple machine has been introduced instead of conventional propeller turbines. The key is using an axial pump as a propeller turbine. In the present research, a propeller pump was simulated as a turbine by numerical methods. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was adopted in the direct and reverse modes performance prediction of a single propeller pump. To give a more accurate CFD result, all domains within the machine control volume were modeled and hexahedral structured mesh was generated during CFD simulation. Complete performance curves of its pump and turbine modes were acquired. For verification of the numerical results, the machine has been tested in an established test ring. The results showed that a propeller pump could be easily run as a low-head turbine. In the next, the goal was to optimize the geometry of the blades of axial turbine runner which leads to maximum hydraulic efficiency by changing the design parameters of camber line in five sections of a blade. The efficiency of the initial geometry was improved by various objective functions and optimized geometry was obtained by genetic algorithm and artificial neural network to find the best efficiency of the turbine. The results showed that the efficiency is improved by more than 14%. Indeed the geometry has better performance in cavitation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inês Isabel Ascensão Costa Morão ◽  
Francisco Miguel Ribeiro Proença Brojo

In the present work a CFD simulation was performed using a CFM56-3 combustor.   It was intended to simulate the combustion and emission of pollutants (CO2, CO, UHC and NOx) from the different jet fuels ( Jet A, Jet B and TS-1), when burning these through ICAO’s LTO cycle. Being this a continuity study, the CAD model of CFM56-3 made by Oliveira [5] was used. The mesh was constructed with HELYX-OS software and the numerical study was made using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent16.2. It can be concluded, amongst all the fuels simulated that increasing the power produces higher NOx. There was also an erratic behaviour in the emissions of UHC and CO results, because an empiric model was used and not a detailed chemical model. Keywords: Jet Fuels, ANSYS Fluent, Pollutants emissions, ICAO’s LTO cycle, CFM56-3


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-125
Author(s):  
Raj Kumar Chaulagain ◽  
Dhiraj Pokhrel ◽  
Kaurab Gautam ◽  
Nabin Khanal ◽  
Harish Bhatt

This paper is focused on design a turbine with composite path runner for ultra low head application and finally analyze its performance under different test conditions. Literature review was the starting point of research and detailed design parameters for the turbine dimensions and materials were selected taking feasibility of fabrication and testing in hand. The testing was proposed on real site of Bagmati river at Kupandole, Lalitpur, Nepal where the turbine was subjected to fuse reeflowing water from the head of 1.3m and flowrate of 78 LPS that taken as site parameter. The 3D model for the turbine was developed in CATIA. For turbine height of 0.77m and runner minor diameter of 0.152m, simulations were carried out to find the most feasible number of blades, blade width, blade spacing, number of guide vanes and guide vane spacing using ANSYS simulation. Among the simulation the best arrangement was blade radial width of 62 mm, blade spacing of 54mm, guide vane spacing of 36.5 mm, total number of blades 25 and total number of guide vanes 7 keeping output power in mind. The experimental results were then compared with the data obtained from calculations and simulations. Turbine at part load of Qo/Qmax = 0.67 was tested and the resulting maximum efficiency was 21.1% at 87 RPM with available flow rate of 52 LPS.


Author(s):  
Jian-Cheng Cai ◽  
Jie Pan ◽  
Andrew Guzzomi

In this paper, the 3-D unsteady turbulent flow inside a centrifugal pump is investigated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in ANSYS CFX, using Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) as the turbulence approach. The pump has a single end-suction and a single volute discharge. The impeller is semi-open (unshrouded with baseplate) and has five backswept blades and pump-out back blades. The CFD model of the pump consists of the inlet, the impeller, and the volute. A sliding mesh technique has been applied to the interfaces in order to allow unsteady interactions between the rotating impeller and the stationary parts. These unsteady interactions generate pressure fluctuations over the volute casing and blade surfaces that are hydroacoustic dipoles according to Lighthill’s acoustic analogy theory. The pressure fluctuation spectra at the volute tongue show that pressure fluctuations are generated mainly by the discrete components related to the impeller rotation at low frequencies, especially the blade-passing frequency (BPF) component. This component is approximately 1% of the reference dynamic pressure 0.5ρν22 where ν2 is the circumferential velocity at the impeller outlet. The discrete components with frequency larger than 4 times BPF are no longer obvious in the spectra. Compared to the experimental results, the CFD simulation predicts much lower amplitudes for the broad band pressure fluctuations. This is reasonable, because DES combines a classical Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulation with elements of Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and both RANS and LES use average methods which filter out the high frequency fluctuations. Nevertheless, CFD is capable of accurately predict the BPF component. The pressure fluctuations on the casing and blade surfaces are extracted and modelled as the stationary and rotary dipoles, respectively, according to the Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings (FW-H) equation of the acoustic analogy theory. After Fast Fourier Transform, the spectra of the pressure fluctuations are obtained, and are used to predict the tonal hydrodynamic sound radiation at BPF and its low order harmonics. The sound radiation of casing surface dipoles is calculated by extracting the tonal components, and performing a surface integration with the fundamental solution to Helmholtz equation as the kernel. A frequency domain formulation of the FW-H equation with the moving surface dipole is employed to predict the tonal blade noise. The results from these acoustical simulations show that the sound power generated by the casing surface dipole is three orders of magnitude higher than that of the blade surface dipole, and the main hydroacoustic sources are located at the volute tongue.


Author(s):  
V. A. SABELNIKOV ◽  
◽  
V. V. VLASENKO ◽  
S. BAKHNE ◽  
S. S. MOLEV ◽  
...  

Gasdynamics of detonation waves was widely studied within last hundred years - analytically, experimentally, and numerically. The majority of classical studies of the XX century were concentrated on inviscid aspects of detonation structure and propagation. There was a widespread opinion that detonation is such a fast phenomenon that viscous e¨ects should have insigni¦cant in§uence on its propagation. When the era of calculations based on the Reynolds-averaged Navier- Stokes (RANS) and large eddy simulation approaches came into effect, researchers pounced on practical problems with complex geometry and with the interaction of many physical effects. There is only a limited number of works studying the in§uence of viscosity on detonation propagation in supersonic §ows in ducts (i. e., in the presence of boundary layers).


2021 ◽  
pp. 0309524X2110039
Author(s):  
Amgad Dessoky ◽  
Thorsten Lutz ◽  
Ewald Krämer

The present paper investigates the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic characteristics of the H-rotor Darrieus vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) combined with very promising energy conversion and steering technology; a fixed guide-vanes. The main scope of the current work is to enhance the aerodynamic performance and assess the noise production accomplished with such enhancement. The studies are carried out in two phases; the first phase is a parametric 2D CFD simulation employing the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) approach to optimize the design parameters of the guide-vanes. The second phase is a 3D CFD simulation of the full turbine using a higher-order numerical scheme and a hybrid RANS/LES (DDES) method. The guide-vanes show a superior power augmentation, about 42% increase in the power coefficient at λ = 2.75, with a slightly noisy operation and completely change the signal directivity. A remarkable difference in power coefficient is observed between 2D and 3D models at the high-speed ratios stems from the 3D effect. As a result, a 3D simulation of the capped Darrieus turbine is carried out, and then a noise assessment of such configuration is assessed. The results show a 20% increase in power coefficient by using the cap, without significant change in the noise signal.


Author(s):  
Adra Benhacine ◽  
Zoubir Nemouchi ◽  
Lyes Khezzar ◽  
Nabil Kharoua

A numerical study of a turbulent plane jet impinging on a convex surface and on a flat surface is presented, using the large eddy simulation approach and the Smagorinski-Lilly sub-grid-scale model. The effects of the wall curvature on the unsteady filtered, and the steady mean, parameters characterizing the dynamics of the wall jet are addressed in particular. In the free jet upstream of the impingement region, significant and fairly ordered velocity fluctuations, that are not turbulent in nature, are observed inside the potential core. Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in the shear layer between the jet and the surrounding air are detected in the form of wavy sheets of vorticity. Rolled up vortices are detached from these sheets in a more or less periodic manner, evolving into distorted three dimensional structures. Along the wall jet the Coanda effect causes a marked suction along the convex surface compared with the flat one. As a result, relatively important tangential velocities and a stretching of sporadic streamwise vortices are observed, leading to friction coefficient values on the curved wall higher than those on the flat wall.


Author(s):  
Tong Li ◽  
Yibin Wang ◽  
Ning Zhao

The simple frigate shape (SFS) as defined by The Technical Co-operative Program (TTCP), is a simplified model of the frigate, which helps to investigate the basic flow fields of a frigate. In this paper, the flow fields of the different modified SFS models, consisting of a bluff body superstructure and the deck, were numerically studied. A parametric study was conducted by varying both the superstructure length L and width B to investigate the recirculation zone behind the hangar. The size and the position of the recirculation zones were compared between different models. The numerical simulation results show that the size and the location of the recirculation zone are significantly affected by the superstructure length and width. The results obtained by Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes method were also compared well with both the time averaged Improved Delayed Detached-Eddy Simulation results and the experimental data. In addition, by varying the model size and inflow velocity, various flow fields were numerically studied, which indicated that the changing of Reynolds number has tiny effect on the variation of the dimensionless size of the recirculation zone. The results in this study have certain reference value for the design of the frigate superstructure.


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