Flow-Feedback for Pressure Fluctuation Mitigation and Pressure Recovery Improvement in a Conical Diffuser with Swirl

Abstract

Our previous experimental and numerical investigations of decelerated swirling flows in conical diffusers have demonstrated that water jet injection along the symmetry axis mitigates the pressure fluctuations associated with the precessing vortex rope. However, for swirling flows similar to Francis turbines operated at partial discharge, the jet becomes effective when the jet discharge is larger than 10% from the turbine discharge, leading to large volumetric losses when the jet is supplied from upstream the runner. As a result, we introduce the flow-feedback approach for supplying the jet by using a fraction of the discharge collected downstream the conical diffuser. Experimental investigations on mitigating the pressure fluctuations generated by the precessing vortex rope and investigations of pressure recovery coefficient on the cone wall with and without flow-feedback method are presented.