• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.397-402
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• 2016

This study presents the performance characteristics of a small Francis turbine with an inline casing and is a continuation of a previous study. A new runner design has been implemented using the previous facility. The specific speed of the new runner has been modified from $N_s$ 80 to $N_s$ $100m-kW-min^{-1}$. This turbine can be installed in a city water supply system. To dissipate excess pressures in the water line system an inline-turbine can be used instead of an inline-pressure reducing valve. Thus, some of the energy can be recovered by utilizing the pressure difference. For best applicability and minimal space consumption, the turbine is designed with an inline casing instead of a common spiral casing. As a characteristic of inline casing, the flow accesses to the runner are in the radial direction, showing low efficiency. The installation of vanes improves the internal flow and positively affects the output power. In contrast to the previous study, the new runner reduces the effect of the stay vanes by maintaining a higher efficiency.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.101-109
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• 2014

Sediment erosion is one of the key challenges in hydraulic turbines from a design and maintenance perspective in Himalayas. The present study focuses on choosing the best design in terms of blade angle distribution of a Francis turbine runner which has least erosion effect without influencing the efficiency and the structural integrity. A fully coupled Fluid-Structure-Interaction (FSI) analysis was performed through a multi-field solver, which showed that the maximum stress induced in the optimized design for better sediment handling, is less than that induced in the reference design. Some numerical validation techniques have been shown for both CFD and FSI analysis.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.687-689
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• 2005

Francis turbine of commercial small hydro -power plants under 10kw which is investigate a flow characterist and an efficiency in the research which it sees, the problem and an improvement is investigate. In the research which it is simply model with casing, guide-vane, runner, draft tube for simulation numerical analysis of small-sized Francis turbine. model uses the Gambit and it composes with approximately 800,000 nonuniform lattices. Solutions are investigate the hydraulic characteristics against an outward angle of guide vane, the number of guide vane, head(inlet velocity) by using FLUENT which is a commercial business code.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.690-692
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• 2005

Among many other alternative energy resources, small scale hydropower has been brought into attention as a reliable source of energy today, which had been relatively neglected since 1960s. Present low head of Francis turbines and small scale hydro turbines, however, have limitations in the minimum required head and flow rate for efficient operation. This study attempts to develope the Francis turbine which is expected to run efficiently even in very low head and small flow rate, so that the limitations on the conventional small scale hydropower could be alleviated and competition with other alternative energy sources in the changable design conditions could be attained. The Francis turbine of a new concept was designed based on changable design conditions, hydrodynamics and theory of power transmission.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.164-175
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• 2017

Francis turbines are often operated over a wide load range due to high flexibility in electricity demand and penetration of other renewable energies. This has raised significant concerns about the existing designing criteria. Hydraulic turbines are not designed to withstand large dynamic pressure loadings on the stationary and rotating parts during such conditions. Previous investigations on transient operating conditions of turbine were mainly focused on the pressure fluctuations due to the rotor-stator interaction. This study characterizes the synchronous and asynchronous pressure and velocity fluctuations due to rotor-stator interaction and rotating vortex rope during load variation, i.e. best efficiency point to part load and vice versa. The measurements were performed on the Francis-99 test case. The repeatability of the measurements was estimated by providing similar movement to guide vanes twenty times for both load rejection and load acceptance operations. Synchronized two dimensional particle image velocimetry and pressure measurements were performed to investigate the dominant frequencies of fluctuations, vortex rope formation, and modes (rotating and plunging) of the rotating vortex rope. The time of appearance and disappearance of rotating and plunging modes of vortex rope was investigated simultaneously in the pressure and velocity data. The asynchronous mode was observed to dominate over the synchronous mode in both velocity and pressure measurements.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.169-182
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• 2015

When simulating the dynamic behaviour of a hydro power plant, it is essential to have a good representation of the turbine behaviour. The pressure transients in the system occurs because the flow changes, which the turbine defines. The flow through the turbine is a function of the pressure, the speed of rotation and the wicket gate opening and is, most often described in a performance diagram or Hill diagram. In the Hill diagram, the efficiency is drawn like contour lines, hence the name. A turbines Hill diagram is obtained by performance tests on scaled model in a laboratory. However, system dynamic simulations have to be performed in the early stage of a project, before the turbine manufacturer has been chosen and the Hill diagram is known. Therefore one have to rely on diagrams for a turbine with similar speed number. The Hill diagram is drawn through measured points, so for using the diagram in a simulation program, one have to iterate in the diagram based on curve fitting of the measured points. This paper describes an alternative method. By means of the Euler turbine equation, it is possible to set up two differential equations which represents the turbine performance with good enough accuracy for the dynamic simulations. The only input is the turbine's main geometry, the runner blade in- and outlet angle and the guide vane angle at best efficiency point of operation (BEP). In the paper, simulated turbine characteristics for a high head Francis turbine, and for a reversible pump turbine are compared with laboratory measured characteristics.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.294-303
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• 2015

The present study is conducted to identify a better design and optimal number of Francis runner blades for sediment laden high head micro hydropower site, Tara Khola in the Baglung district of Nepal. The runner is designed with in-house code and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is performed to evaluate the performance with three configurations; 11, 13 and 17 numbers of runner blades. The three sets of runners were also investigated for the sediment erosion tendency. The runner with 13 blades shows better performance at design as well as in variable discharge conditions. 96.2% efficiency is obtained from the runner with 13 blades at the design point, and the runners with 17 and 11 blades have 88.25% and 76.63% efficiencies respectively. Further, the runner with 13 blades has better manufacturability than the runner with 17 blades as it has long and highly curved blade with small gaps between the blades, but it comes with 65% more erosion tendency than in the runner with 17 blades.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.20-27
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• 2016

The Francis-99 is a workshop initiated by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway, and Lulea University of Technology (LTU), Sweden, in order to further validate the capabilities of the CFD technologies. The goal of the first workshop is to determine the state of the art of numerical predictions for steady operating conditions. When performing the CFD analysis, some geometry details are often neglected. In case of Francis Turbine, labyrinth seals are usually not include in the simulation domain, this may lead to inaccurate prediction of turbine efficiency. In this study, the CFD analysis for Francis-99 Workshop model has been performed for full domain of machine including top and bottom labyrinth seals. The efficiency value and distribution of velocity and pressure have been investigated and compared to the experimental data obtained from NTNU. By comparing the results, it was found that: With the top and bottom labyrinth seals in the domain, the CFD result was significantly improved in prediction of efficiency at all the operating point, especially at part load.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.191.2-191.2
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• 2010

The conventional method to assess turbine performance is its model testing which becomes costly and time consuming for several design alternatives in design optimization. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become a cost effective tool for predicting detailed flow information in turbine space to enable the selection of best design. In the present paper, Francis turbine of commercial small hydropower plants which is under 70kw is investigated. Solutions are investigated with respect to the hydraulic characteristics against an outward angle of guide vane, the number of guide vane and head (inlet velocity). By suitable modification of the runner shape, low pressure zone on the leading edge can be reduced. If the entire runner is to be optimized in this manner, flow simulation tests have to be carried out on a series of different geometrical shape.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.328-336
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• 2020

In the Francis turbine, the leakage flow through the runner gaps which are between the runner and the stator structure influences the internal flow and hydraulic performance. Thus, the investigation for the flow characteristics induced by the runner gaps is important. However, the runner gaps are often disregarded by considering the time and cost of the numerical analysis. Therefore, in this study, the flow characteristics according to runner gaps of the Francis turbine model were investigated including the leakage flow of the runner cone. The three-dimensional unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analyses were conducted using a scale-adaptive simulation shear stress transport as a turbulence model for observing the influence of the leakage flow on the internal flow and hydraulic performance. The efficiencies were decreased slightly with runner gaps; and the complicated flows were captured in the gaps.