CFD-BASED PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF KAPLAN TURBINE FOR MICRO HYDRO RANGE

Abstract

Electricity generation through conventional energy resources causes pollution, global warming & further power deficiency in the world due to increase in load demand causes the power sector to shift towards the renewable energy resources. Large part of renewable energy is covered by the hydropower, which is most promising and economical resource of energy. India is endowed with rich hydropower potential; it ranks fifth in the world in terms of usable potential. Micro hydro power plant comes under the renewable energy of hydro power. The micro hydro plant plays very important role in extraction of power from ultra low head available in stream and it helps electrification of rural which are not connected from grid. Turbine is most critical component in hydro power plant because it affects the cost as well as overall performance of the plant. The cost effective design for any power plant directly . depend upon the hydro turbine performance. Performance analysis of hydro turbine gives high quality and reliability of hydro power project and also ensure the project is economical viable or not. The turbines associated with micro hydro range have poor part load efficiency. There is need of turbine which provide good part load efficiency to extract full potential only Kaplan turbine provide good part load efficiency. To determine the part load efficiency of Kaplan turbine it is essential to do . the performance analysis of turbine for different operating conditions. The conventional approach to assess turbine performance is its model testing which becomes costly and time consuming. For micro hydro range cost is dominating factor so the model testing can't use. Computational fluid dynamics(CFD) has becomes a cost effective tool for predicting the performance of turbine and also for predicting detailed flow information in turbine space to enable the selection of best operating condition. In the present study, the turbine of 100 kW of capacity has been considered for the CFD based performance analysis. The 3D model of the parts has been created in PRO-E wildfire-2 modeling software. Meshing of the models has been done with help of ANSYS-14 software and simulation has been done with help of FLUENT software which is one of the modules of ANSYS-14 software. The simulation has been carried out for. design and off-design conditions at four different operating points. For different operating condition, at each operating condition four simulations has been taken place to optimize the runner blade angle. The optimized runner blade angle has been analyzed in order to investigate the part load efficiency of Kaplan turbine.