Design and Fabrication of In-line Turbine for Pico Hydro Energy Recovery in Treated Sewage Water Distribution Line

All the recent growth in all the fields converge towards one focal point of consistent increase in demand of electricity. This being one facet of world's requirement, other facet being the urge to produce clean energy without release of carbon dioxide. These are the strong reasons that leads to production of clean and innovative methods for energy harnessing. Hence in the present study, pico hydro power generation technique is adapted in which a hydro turbine was designed and developed that could be installed in an existing pipeline system to generate electricity. The turbine is designed in such a way that it can be installed in-line with the pipe with no loss of mass flow rate. The basic idea is to install this turbine at the outlet of the overhead tank, so that the energy from the flowing high pressure water, that is otherwise wasted, could be extracted for power generation. An overhead tank with a head of 14 meter and a discharge of 9 liter per second which stores sewage treated water is chosen to achieve this. An impulse turbine which was developed for this purpose was installed in this tank and studies were carried out to measure the units of electricity generated. It's observed that for a flow of 8 liter per second a maximum electrical power of 212 watts is generated. Hence this shows that this could be solution for distributed generation of clean energy. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.