• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.19-25
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• 2005

Francis turbine of commercial small hydropower 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 non-uniform 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.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.182-193
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• 2016

Introduction of intermittent electricity production systems like wind and solar power to electricity market together with the deregulation of electricity markets resulted in numerous start/stops, load variations and off-design operation of water turbines. Hydraulic turbines suffer from the varying loads exerted on their stationary and rotating parts during load variations since they are not designed for such operating conditions. Investigations on part load operation of single regulated turbines, i.e., Francis and propeller, proved the formation of a rotating vortex rope (RVR) in the draft tube. The RVR induces pressure pulsations in the axial and rotating directions called plunging and rotating modes, respectively. This results in oscillating forces with two different frequencies on the runner blades, bearings and other rotating parts of the turbine. This study investigates the effect of transient operations on the pressure fluctuations exerted on the runner and mechanism of the RVR formation/mitigation. Draft tube and runner blades of the Porjus U9 model, a Kaplan turbine, were equipped with pressure sensors for this purpose. The model was run in off-cam mode during different load variations. The results showed that the transients between the best efficiency point and the high load occurs in a smooth way. However, during transitions to the part load a RVR forms in the draft tube which induces high level of fluctuations with two frequencies on the runner; plunging and rotating mode. Formation of the RVR during the load rejections coincides with sudden pressure change on the runner while its mitigation occurs in a smooth way.

• 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.2 no.4
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• pp.375-382
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• 2009

Hydraulic instability associated with pressure fluctuations is a serious problem in hydraulic machinery. Pressure fluctuations are usually a result of a strong vortex created in the centre of a flow at the outlet of a runner. At every radial turbine and also at every single regulating axial turbine, the draft tube vortex appears at part-load operating regimes. The consequences of the vortex developed in the draft tube are very unpleasant pressure pulsation, axial and radial forces and torque fluctuation as well as turbine structure vibration. The consequences of the vortex are transferred upstream and downstream with amplitude and frequency modulation in respect of the turbine operating regime, cavitation conditions and air admitted content. Numerical prediction of the vortex appearance in the design stage is a very important task. The amplitude of the pressure pulsation is different for each operating regime therefore the main goal of this research was to numerically predict pressure pulsation amplitude versus different guide vane openings and to compare the results with experimental ones. For the numerical flow analysis of a complete Francis turbine (FT), the computer code ANSYS-CFX11 has been used.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.47-56
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• 2011

Our previous experimental and numerical investigations of decelerated swirling flows in conical diffusers have demonstrated that water jet injection along the symmetry axis mitigates the pressure fluctuations associated with the precessing vortex rope. However, for swirling flows similar to Francis turbines operated at partial discharge, the jet becomes effective when the jet discharge is larger than 10% from the turbine discharge, leading to large volumetric losses when the jet is supplied from upstream the runner. As a result, we introduce the flow-feedback approach for supplying the jet by using a fraction of the discharge collected downstream the conical diffuser. Experimental investigations on mitigating the pressure fluctuations generated by the precessing vortex rope and investigations of pressure recovery coefficient on the cone wall with and without flow-feedback method are presented.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.315-323
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• 2009

Pressure oscillations triggered by the unstable interaction of dynamic flow features of the hydraulic turbine with the hydraulic plant system - including the electrical design - can at times reach significant levels and could lead to damage of plant components or could reduce component lifetime significantly. Such a problem can arise for overload as well as for part load operation of the turbine. This paper discusses an approach to analyze the overload high pressure oscillation problem using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling of the hydraulic machine combined with a network modeling technique of the hydraulic system. The key factor in this analysis is the determination of the overload vortex rope volume occurring within the turbine under the runner which is acting as an active element in the system. Two different modeling techniques to compute the flow field downstream of the runner will be presented in this paper. As a first approach, single phase flow simulations are used to evaluate the vortex rope volume before moving to more sophisticated modeling which incorporates two phase flow calculations employing cavitation modeling. The influence of these different modeling strategies on the simulated plant behavior will be discussed.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.2 no.2 s.3
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• pp.27-31
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• 1999

This paper describes the shaft vibration phenomena measured on a pump-turbine of a pumped storage power plant. The pump-turbine runs at a rotational speed of 450 rpm (7.5 Hz). The power output (load) of the pump-turbine is varied from 100 to 300 MW in the generating mode. The magnitude of the shaft vibration highly depends on the power load. The vibration magnitude of the shaft is very high in the middle load zone from 170 to 210 MW, elsewhere the vibration is low. From nitration spectra, it is shown that the frequency of major nitration in that load zone is 2.5 Hz which is approximately $34\%$ of the shaft rotating speed in Hz. This frequency component does not occur below and above that load zone. This subsynchronous vibration is caused by the flow induced disturbance due to spiral vortex flow downstream of the pump-turbine runner. Furthermore, the shaft vibration is highly decreased due to an increased bearing preload.

• 유체기계공업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1998.12a
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• pp.166-172
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• 1998

This paper describes the shaft vibration phenomena measured on a pump-turbine ofa pumped storage power plant. The pump-turbine runs at a rotational speed of 450 rpm (7.5 Hz). The power output (load) of the pump-turbine was varied from 100 to 300 MW in the generating mode. It was found that the magnitude of the shaft vibration was highly dependent upon the power load. The vibration magnitude of the shaft vibration is very high in the middle load zone from 170 to 210 MW, elsewhere the vibration low. From vibration spectra, it was found that the frequency of major vibration in that load zone was 2.5 Hz which is approximately $34\%$ of the shaft rotating speed in Hz. This frequency component disappeared below and above that load zone. This subsynchronous vibration is caused by the flow induced disturbance due to spiral vortex flow downstream of the pump-turbine runner. Furthermore, it was found that shaft vibration was highly decreased due to the increase of bearing preload.