• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.142-154
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• 2015

Nowadays, computational fluid dynamics is commonly used by design engineers to evaluate and compare losses in hydraulic components as it is less expensive and less time consuming than model tests. For that purpose, an automatic tool for casing and distributor analysis will be presented in this paper. An in-house mesh generator and a Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equation solver using the standard $k-{\omega}$ shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model will be used to perform all computations. Two solvers based on the C++ OpenFOAM library will be used and compared to a commercial solver. The performance of the new fully coupled block solver developed by the University of Lucerne and Andritz will be compared to the standard 1.6ext segregated simpleFoam solver and to a commercial solver. In this study, relative comparisons of different geometries of casing and distributor will be performed. The present study is thus aimed at validating the block solver and the tool chain and providing design engineers with a faster and more reliable analysis tool that can be integrated into their design process.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.132-141
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• 2015

This paper presents a CFD-based methodology for the prediction of guide vane torque in hydraulic turbine distributor for aligned and misaligned configurations. A misaligned or desynchronized configuration occurs when the opening angle of one guide vane differs from the opening angle of all other guide vanes, which may lead to a torque increase on neighbouring guide vanes. A fully automated numerical procedure is presented, that automates computations for a complete range of operation of a 2D or 3D distributor. Results are validated against laboratory measurements.