Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
Hydraulic turbines are turbo machines which produce
electricity from hydraulic energy. Francis type turbines are the
most common one in use today. The design of these turbines
requires high engineering effort since each turbine is tailor
made due to different head and discharge values. Therefore
each component of the turbine is designed specifically. During
the last decades, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has
become very useful tool to predict hydraulic machinery
performance and save time and money for designers. This
paper describes a design methodology to optimize a Francis
turbine by integrating theoretical and experimental
fundamentals of hydraulic machines and commercial CFD
codes.
