Experimental Evaluation of Advanced Archimedes Hydrodynamic Screw Geometries

There is increasing interest in the application of Archimedes hydrodynamic screws (AHS) to generate hydroelectric power. Although numerous theoretical and experimental investigations have been published on this application of AHS over the last decade, there have been no experimental evaluations in the literature of blade shapes other than the helicoid. This research provides the results of bench-scale testing of three-dimensional (3D)-printed models to evaluate the performance of various shapes and parameters for AHS. Three different screws are explored to experimentally compare the new blade shapes: the helicoid, strake, and reverse strake.