羽根車直径50mmのインライン小型ハイドロタービンの研究開発

抄録

Small-scale hydropower is one of the important alternative energy, and is expected because of its large amount of energy and high capacity factor. However, small hydropower generation over 10kW have problems that there is a limit to the installation place and the environmental load is relatively large. Therefore, we focused on pico hydropower less than 1 kW, which can be applied to agricultural pipelines and has a low environmental load. Since pico hydropower has the problem of low efficiency, we adopt contra-rotating rotors that can be expected to achieve high performance. It is necessary to develop small hydroturbines that can keep high performance over a wide flow rate range. In previous research, performance characteristics for contra-rotating small hydroturbines were investigated by experiments and numerical analysis, and the possibility of higher performance was shown. As the next step, his research is on the verification stage in field experiments. Therefore, we investigated the head and flow rate of the field and obtained the theoretical power. Next, we considered miniaturization and designed small hydroturbines having a 50mm rotor diameter which were suitable for the field. Then, we evaluated their performances and internal flows by numerical analysis.