Particle-based evaluations of fish-friendliness in Kaplan turbine operations

The concept of fish friendliness of hydroturbines relates to the effects of a unit design and its operating conditions on the success of migratory fish survival during passage through turbine flows. Most computer-based studies of fish friendliness approximate fish trajectories with streamlines; this work introduces a particle-based method to account for collisions on two typically interrogated structures: the stator and the runner. We implemented the method in various operating points of a Kaplan turbine simulated with computational fluid dynamics. The results indicated that only a small percentile of the particle sample collides severely with the stator (