Blade passage modeling strategy for hydraulic turbine

CFD has played a significant role to investigate the performance and improve the design of hydraulic turbines; however, the improvement of CFD method demands powerful computer resources including time, CPU, memory, and commercial licenses. In present work, both global and local parameters of a high head Francis turbine were studied using several geometrical and interface modelling approaches. The aim of the work is to find suitable strategy for designers to simulate the hydraulic turbines to balance the numerical accuracy and the requirement of computational resources. The geometrical modelling approaches include combinations of turbine components such as, spiral casing, distributor, runner and draft tube. The interface modelling approaches includes, stage, Frozen rotor and transient rotorstator types. The study showed that the proper combinations of both approaches can effectively reduce the numerical error.