Simulation of a Pelton turbine using the moving particle simulation method: application to two challenging situations

Simulation of the flow in a Pelton turbine is a challenging task for mesh based methods due to the air/water mixture and the rotation of the runner. Meshless based methods are better suited for such flows and take advantage of the graphical power unit to speed up the calculation. Simulations of a Pelton turbine are carried out using the software Particleworks based on moving particle simulation, which is a meshless method. The efficiency drop due to the 'falaise' effect and the erosion of the splitter are computed and compared with either experimental measurements or the literature. The results show that this method is able to capture the tendency of the efficiency drop in agreement with the available data and at a lower computational cost than the mesh based methods. These encouraging results should motivate the community to test and validate such an approach.