Water hammer phenomena are important issues for the design and the operation of hydro power plants. Especially, if several reversible pump-turbines are coupled hydraulically there may be strong unit interactions. The precise prediction of all relevant transients is challenging. Regarding a recent pump-storage project, dynamic measurements motivate an improved turbine modeling approach making use of a Thoma number dependency. The proposed method is validated for several transient scenarios and turns out to improve correlation between measurement and simulation results significantly. Starting from simple scenarios, this allows better prediction of more complex transients. By applying a fully automated simulation procedure broad operating ranges of the highly nonlinear system can be covered providing a consistent insight into the plant dynamics. This finally allows the optimization of the closing strategy and hence the overall power plant performance.

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Aerating hydroturbines have recently been proposed as an effective way to mitigate the problem of low dissolved oxygen in the discharge of hydroelectric power plants. The design of such a hydroturbine requires a precise understanding of the dependence of the generated bubble size distribution upon the operating conditions (viz. liquid velocity, air ventilation rate, hydrofoil configuration, etc.) and the consequent rise in dissolved oxygen in the downstream water. The purpose of the current research is to investigate the effect of location of air injection on the resulting bubble size distribution, thus leading to a quantitative analysis of aeration statistics and capabilities for two turbine blade hydrofoil designs. The two blade designs differed in their location of air injection. Extensive sets of experiments were conducted by varying the liquid velocity, aeration rate and the hydrofoil angle of attack, to characterize the resulting bubble size distribution. Using a shadow imaging technique to capture the bubble images in the wake and an in-house developed image analysis algorithm, it was found that the hydrofoil with leading edge ventilation produced smaller size bubbles as compared to the hydrofoil being ventilated at the trailing edge.

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The computational cost is expensive for CFD-DEM simulation, a larger time step and a simplified CFD-DEM model can be used to accelerate the simulation. The relationship between stiffness and overlap in non-linear Hertzian model is examined, and a reasonable time step is determined by a new single particle test. The simplified model is used to simulate dilute pneumatic conveying with different types of bends, and its applicability is verified by compared with the traditional model. They are good agreement in horizontal-vertical case and vertical-horizontal case, and show a significant differences in horizontal-horizontal case. But the key features of particle rope formed in different types of bends can be obtained by both models.

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To investigate the influence of blade profiles on cavitation behavior in impeller of centrifugal pump, a centrifugal pump with five different blade profiles impellers are studied numerically. The impellers with five different blade profiles (single arc, double arcs, triple arcs, logarithmic spiral and linear -variable angle spiral) were designed by the in-house hydraulic design code using geometric parameters of IS 150-125-125 centrifugal pump. The experiments of the centrifugal pump have been conducted to verify numerical simulation model. The numerical results show that the blade profile lines has a weak effect on cavitation inception near blade inlet edge position, however it has the key effect on the development of sheet cavitation in impeller, and also influences the distribution of sheet cavitation in impeller channels. A slight changing of blade setting angle will induce significant difference of cavitation in impeller. The sharp changing of impeller blade setting angle causes obvious cavitation region separation near the impeller inlet close to blade suction surface and much more flow loss. The centrifugal pump with blade profile of setting angle gently changing (logarithmic spiral) has the super cavitation performance, which means smaller critical cavitation number and lower vapor cavity volume fraction at the same conditions.

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In the Nordic grid, a trend observed the recent years is the increase in grid frequency variations, which means the frequency is outside the normal range (49.9-50.1 Hz) more often. Variations in the grid frequency leads to changes in the speed of rotation of all the turbines connected to the grid, since the speed of rotation is closely related to the grid frequency for synchronous generators. When the speed of rotation changes, this implies that the net torque acting on the rotating masses are changed, and the material of the turbine runners must withstand these changes in torque. Frequency variations thus leads to torque oscillations in the turbine, which become dynamical loads that the runner must be able to withstand. Several new Francis runners have recently experienced cracks in the runner blades due to fatigue, obviously due to the runner design not taking into account the actual loads on the runner. In this paper, the torque oscillations and dynamic loads due to the variations in grid frequency are simulated in a 1D MATLAB program, and measured grid frequency is used as input to the simulation program. The maximum increase and decrease in the grid frequency over a 440 seconds interval have been investigated, in addition to an extreme event where the frequency decreased far below the normal range within a few seconds. The dynamic loading originating from grid frequency variations is qualitatively found by a constructed variable Tstress, and for the simulations presented here the variations in Tstress are found to be around 3 % of the mean value, which is a relatively small dynamic load. The important thing to remember is that these dynamic loads come in addition to all other dynamic loads, like rotor-stator interaction and draft tube surges, and should be included in the design process, if not found to be negligible.

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The efficiency of the ventilation system is a key point for durable and reliable electric generators. The design of such system requires a detailed understanding of the air flow in the generator. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has the potential to resolve the lack of information in this field. The present work analyses the air flow inside a generator model. The model is designed using a CFD-based approach, and manufactured by taking into consideration the experimental and numerical requirements and limitations. The emphasis is on the possibility to accurately predict and experimentally measure the flow distribution inside the stator channels. A major part of the work is focused on the design of an intake and a fan that gives an evenly distributed flow with a high flow rate. The intake also serves as an accurate flowmeter. Experimental results are presented, of the total volume flow rate, the total pressure and velocity distributions. Steady-state CFD simulations are performed using the FOAM-extend CFD toolbox. The simulations are based on the multiple rotating reference frames method. The results from the frozen rotor and mixing plane rotor-stator coupling approaches are compared. It is shown that the fan design provides a sufficient flow rate for the stator channels, which is not the case without the fan or with a previous fan design. The detailed experimental and numerical results show an excellent agreement, proving that the results reliable.

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