A CFD-based design methodology for hydraulic turbines applied to a case study in Turkey

Abstract

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.