低落差二重反転形小型ハイドロタービンの基礎研究

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, we have designed turbines with diameters of 49 mm and 76 mm, and these turbines have specifications that are suitable for the medium-head environments in which they are expected to be used, such as agricultural canals and river fish farms. Therefore, in this study, with the aim of expanding the application field of small hydroturbines and understanding the application range of the counter-rotating mechanism, we designed new turbines with diameters of 76 mm and 121 mm (D76 low head model，D121model) , and evaluated their performance characteristics and internal flow by numerical analysis. In addition, for the D76 low head model, we manufactured a turbine and a demonstration test apparatus, and conducted a power generation experiment under a test environment simulating a field environment to evaluate the power generation performance of small hydroturbines at each flow point.