A Comprehensive Review of Verification and Validation Techniques Applied to Hydraulic Turbines

Abstract

The paper critically reviews the verification and validation (VV) techniques applied to investigate hydraulic turbines. Although there are well-established standards such as AIAA G-077-1998 and ERCOFTAC guide for turbulence modelling, majority of studies conducted on the turbines are lacking of systematic VV. Results without proper VV serve no purpose for safe and reliable designs of turbines. Available standards/guide are for general-purpose industrial applications and have limited scope. Customized VV procedure for the turbine applications is essential to create trust on the obtained results. The present review discusses how available standards/guide can be used to determine uncertainty/error and to demonstrate the credibility of results. The review includes several aspects of VV such as effect of discretization schemes, iterative error, convergence criteria, time-step sizing and impact of passage modeling approaches on the results. Further, how numerical results mislead the user and its implications are addressed. In the last, open questions on turbine modelling and recommendations on prospective numerical studies are discussed.