SIMULATION OF FLOW THROUGH VERTICAL GRAVITATIONAL VORTEX TURBINE SYSTEM USING WEAKLY COMPRESSIBLE SPH

Abstract

 The Weakly Compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (WCSPH) has been applied to simulate the flow through a vertical Gravitational Vortex Turbine (GVT) configuration and the motion of the turbine of a small hydropower system. The turbine blades are assumed to be rigid bodies moving with one-degree of freedom, which is the rotation about its shaft due to the hydrodynamic forces of the flow. The intake flow is an open channel flow which falls into a cylindrical basin which houses the turbine and impinges on the turbine blades. The method of simulation is the Weakly Compressible Smoothed Hydrodynamics (WCSPH) with the turbulence models in the equations of motion and the boundary conditions. The results are compared with a laboratory experiments conducted for the same dimension and the configuration. The flow features agree well and the motion of the turbune with a representative mass and a load agrees reasonably with the laboratory experiments.