Development and optimization design of pit turbine with super low-head

Tubular turbines have many advantages such as large flow, high-speed, high efficiency, wide and high efficiency area, compact structure, simple layout, etc. With those advantages, tubular turbine is becoming one of the most economic and suitable types of turbines to develop low head hydraulic resources. According to the general situation of the hydropower station in the north of Jiangsu, a super low head pit turbine which head is set as about 2m is developed by the research to utilize the low head hydraulic resource. The CFD technology was used to calculate the flow field. The computing zone was meshed with unstructured gird. The whole flow passage of shaft type tubular turbine was calculated by 3-d steady turbulent numerical simulation. The detail of flowthrough the whole flowpassage was attained and the influence to the turbine's performance was analyzed by the low head runner blade's various diameters, airfoils and setting angles. The best turbine runner was obtained by considering all the methods. Meeting the station's requirements, the results show that the runner exhibits the highest performance in the efficiency, hydraulic loss and static pressure sides with 1.75m diameter, optimized airfoil and 23 degree setting angle. The developed super low head pit turbine shows highest efficiency under the design condition of 2.1m water head and 10m(3)/s flow rate. GD-WS-35 turbine model test was carried out tostudy the performance of the turbine. On the basis ofmodel transformation principle, the numerical simulationresultof GD-WS-175turbine was compared with the model results. It's showed that the model test result is basically consistent with numerical simulationresult. The producing error in the numerical computation is not easy to control. The efficiency's error range is +/- 3%.