Living in the 21st century and having huge potentials of renewable energy resources, people in this part of the world are still deprived of the basic needs of life, among those clean sources of energy is one. Renewable systems have direct local environment benefits in terms of substituting for existing diesel-based power generation. The efficiency of a turbine is highly influenced by its runner. The focus of the study is to design and optimize the Kaplan turbine runner. First, a theoretical design was performed for determining the main characteristics where it showed an efficiency of 4%. theoretical equations are generalized and simplified and also, they assumed constants of experienced data and hence a theoretical design will only be approximate. This was confirmed as the same theoretical design showed only 57% of efficiency when CFD simulation was run on the model. Then, the theoretically proposed design was further analyzed, inlet/outlet tangential velocities of the blades were analyzed and corrected with CFD Fluent to improve the efficiency of power generation. The original design could be improved to achieve an efficiency of 86%. In the end, more suitable and appropriate method was suggested to optimize the design.
Zahid Masood CFD Based Optimization of Kaplan Turbine Blade Profile International Journal of Engineering Works Vol. 7 Issue 02 PP. 80-83 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.34259/ijew.20.7028083
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