Webinar: Design optimization of Francis turbine by TURBOdesign Suite

The design of Francis turbines and all hydraulic turbines has traditionally relied on empirical approaches based on trial and error iteration of the different component of the turbine consisting of volute, stay vanes, guide vanes, runner and draft tube by using CFD computations and model testing. However, the requirement to optimize the turbine performance under varying head conditions and flow rates as well as performance in pump mode for PAT applications and the need to meet both efficiency and cavitation performance requirements has increased the pressure to consider alternative design approaches that can solve these multi-point and multi-objective requirements. The 3D inverse design method offers one of the best means of meeting these multi-point and multi-objective requirements for hydraulic turbines as it can cover a large design space with very small number of design parameters. This enables efficient multi-point optimization hydraulic turbines.

About the TURBOdesign Suite

Advanced Design Technology has been focusing its development and R&D work on key areas that can have a major impact on de-carbonisation and it views energy storage as one of the key areas of work to enable further growth of   wind and solar energy. So in this webinar on Francis turbine we will show how the newly developed meanline design code for Francis turbine, which has been recently developed in TURBOdesign Suite, can be used to do the initial sizing of all components of a Francis turbine from volute, stay vane, guide vane and runner. The meanline code TURBOdesign Pre not only does the initial sizing of the whole stage given very basic requirements such as flow rate and head but it also gives all the initial inputs for TURBOdesign1 (the 3D inverse method which is part of TURBOdesign Suite) to generate the 3D shapes of all the components such as stay vane, guide vane and runner. Also it passes all the necessary information to TURBOdesign Volute, which is an inverse design based two dimensional method for volute design to create the 3D geometry of the volute can be then exported directly as a 3D CAD file.

What to expect from this webinar

In the webinar we will demonstrate how the new meanline code TURBOdesign Pre coupled with TURBOdesign1 and TURBOdesign Volute can be used to quickly generate a complete 3D Francis Turbine stage that meet the main duty points of the stage and provide a high efficiency. Furthermore, we will show how TURBOdesign1 with its direct control of blade loading or pressure jump across the blade provides the best means of directly controlling the efficiency and cavitation performance of the runner. TURBOdesign1 runs very quickly, a few seconds on a single CPU core, and can provide very accurate prediction of static pressure which compares well with CFD. The static pressure information can be used to assess cavitation performance as blade loading is changed. Also by correlating isentropic velocities to profile losses the output of TURBOdesign1 can be used to rank design in terms of efficiency. To demonstrate this fact two different runner designs are generated one for high efficiency and the other for high cavitation performance and the results are verified by 3D RANS computations.