The customer approached MSI during the design phase of their project looking for assistance with improving an existing hydro turbine design for ultra-low head hydropower applications. The design incorporated unique elements not common in the industry, and presented several unique challenges.
Using MSI’s Hydro Turbine Design Process, areas for improvement were quickly and clearly identified. After discussing these with the customer, MSI focused on improving the blade design through the use of several design and analysis tools such as finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). After rapid iteration, a revised blade design and subsequent operating profile provided an efficiency gain of several percentage points, providing the customer with a hydro turbine design capable of producing power effectively in ultra-low head installations.
MSI's extensive CFD models (in this case over 16 million vertices) provide for accurate simulations and rapid iterations for design optimization.
CFD streamline analysis demonstrates optimized flow
CFD pressure analysis demonstrates an optimized pressure profile for low cavitation even at low heads
