Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : September 08, 2019 - September 11, 2019
In recent years, renewable energy attracts attention due to the concern about the global warming by fossil fuel use. Among them, small hydropower is effective because stable power generation is possible throughout the year, and there are many places that can generate electricity. Although small hydropower is already widespread, there is a problem that there is a limit to the installation place and the load on the natural environment is relatively large for the large scale small hydropower over 10kW. Therefore, we focused on power generation using pico hydropower, which can be applied to agricultural water and small stream. Because pico hydropower is less efficient than large water turbines, we adopted contra-rotating rotors that can be expected to be highly efficient. In addition, focus on inline agricultural water, we designed the inline small hydroturbine. In previous researches, the influences of the tip clearance, solidity and blade thickness on the efficiency were investigated, and each preferred value has been studied. In this report, we created a new impeller model that combines the preferred values of tip clearance, solidity, and blade thickness clarified by the previous studies, and investigated the performance improvement effect by numerical analysis. As a result, the pressure loss and the internal flow condition of the high performance model improved compared with the base model, and the efficiency was improved.
