• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.137-143
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• 2010

In this study, the ejector design was modeled using Fluent 6.3 of FVM(Finite Volume Method) CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) techniques to resolve the flow dynamics in the ejector. A vacuum system with the ejector has been widely used because of its simple construction and easy maintenance. Ejector is the main part of the desalination system, of which designs determine the efficiency of system. The effects of the ejector was investigated geometry and the operating conditions in the hydraulic characteristics. The ejector consists mainly of a nozzle, suction chamber, mixing tube(throat), diffuser and draft tube. Liquid is supplied to the ejector nozzle, the fast liquid jet produced by the nozzle entrains and the non condensable gas was sucked into the mixing tube. In the present study, the multiphase CFD modeling was carried out to determine the hydrodynamic characteristics of seawater-air ejector. Two-dimensional geometry was considered with the quadrilateral-mashing scheme. The gas suction rate increases with increasing Motive flow circulating rate.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.63-72
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• 2015

Water hammer phenomena are important issues for the design and the operation of hydro power plants. Especially, if several reversible pump-turbines are coupled hydraulically there may be strong unit interactions. The precise prediction of all relevant transients is challenging. Regarding a recent pump-storage project, dynamic measurements motivate an improved turbine modeling approach making use of a Thoma number dependency. The proposed method is validated for several transient scenarios and turns out to improve correlation between measurement and simulation results significantly. Starting from simple scenarios, this allows better prediction of more complex transients. By applying a fully automated simulation procedure broad operating ranges of the highly nonlinear system can be covered providing a consistent insight into the plant dynamics. This finally allows the optimization of the closing strategy and hence the overall power plant performance.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.67-71
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• 2014

Recently, the cross flow turbine attracts more and more attention for its good performance over a large operating regime at off design point. This study adopts a very low head cross flow turbine that has barely been studied before, and investigates the effect of air layer on the performance of the cross flow turbine. As open duct is applied in this study and free surface model is used between the air layer and water, an engineering definition of efficiency, instead of traditional definition of efficiency, is used. As torque at the runner fluctuates up and down at a reasonable limit, statistical method is used. Pressure and water volume fraction contours are shown to present the characteristics of air-water flow. With constant air suction in the runner chamber, the water level gradually drops below the runner and efficiency of the turbine can be raised by 10 percent. All considered, the effect of air layer on the performance of turbine is considerable.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.152-160
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• 2012

Model tests and CFD were carried out to find out the cause of cavitation surge in hydraulic power plants. In experiments the cavitation surge was observed at flow rate, both with and without a surge tank placed just upstream of the inlet volute. The surge frequency at smaller flow rate was much smaller than the swirl mode frequency caused by the whirl of vortex rope. An unsteady CFD was carried out with two boundary conditions: (1) the flow rate is fixed to be constant at the volute inlet, (2) the total pressure is kept constant at the volute inlet, corresponding to the experiments without/with the surge tank. The surge was observed with both boundary conditions at both higher and lower flow rates. Discussions as to the cause of the surge are made based on additional tests with an orifice at the diffuser exit, and with the diffuser replaced with a straight pipe.