EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF A PICO HYDRO TURBINE MANUFACTURED BY INDALMA INDUSTRIES INC.
Nigel Sloot1; Ramsay Mac Donald1; Nawin Ryan Nannan1; Rudi van Els2
1 Anton de Kom University of Suriname (AdeKUS); 2 University of Brasilia
doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-2640
Resumo
The work presented within this paper is the result of a test project conducted in 2013 spanning a period of six months at the University of Brasilia (UnB) in collaboration with the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (AdeKUS). The aim of said project was to firstly determine the performance characteristics of a pico hydro turbine manufactured by Indalma Industries Inc. (3I), a company based in Brazil. As a second objective, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was done to qualitatively identify, as a first assessment, the regions of flow losses in the turbine, and the interaction of the stator-rotor transition region. The experimental campaign at UnB yielded the following results, viz. the performance characteristics of the turbine in terms of the power-, flow and efficiency curves as a function of the rotational speed of the shaft, whereas the optimum efficiency lies at 68.5%, as well as the turbines specific speed. Moreover, the experimental results provided the boundary conditions for the CFD analyses. Using the experimental results as a point of departure, the numerical analyses showed that due to the absence of inlet guide vanes (IGV), high losses occur within the stator-rotor transition region, although these losses are unquantified it is evident that they are significantly larger than comparable turbines of the same order (Dixon & Hall, 2010). Furthermore, given the fact that for this specific turbine, approximately midway the shroud, it is non-smooth and additionally exceeds the typical value of 15 degrees for the flow angle, extra, yet avoidable, losses are present.
Palavras-chave: CFD; Indalma turbine; Performance characteristics; Pico hydropower