Rapid Prototyping of Underwater Micro turbine Fed Generator Set

Abstract

Micro Hydro is a micro hydro-power plant (MHP) on a small scale. Micro hydro power plant is a water discharge which it’s flow is not continued every year because influenced by weather season. To knowing the right of micro hydro’s characteristics is not an easy thing to learn it, because a characteristic each of micro hydro’s installation locations is considered a specific location. One type of micro hydro is using Archimedes Screw Turbine. The Archimedes screw turbine (AST) is the most sustainable micro hydropower extraction method that offers a number of economic, social and environmental advantages. Nowadays, many researchers are interested in AST development as it is declared a new technology. In the case of a real site with a small inclination angle, the length of the screw is large enough to cause severe problems, especially related to bending of the screw. Therefore, this research was conducted to analyze the CFD flow feld in a real site-scale AST with the maximum possible inclination of 45 degrees. In addition, the design was done without the upper and lower reservoir as it was conceived as a run-of-river flow system. The simulated real scale AST result showed a maximum efficiency of around 8 percent for a 5.5 m hydraulic head and 0.232 m3/s discharge. This CFD study indicates that even higher inclination angle ASTs can achieve 80 percent efficiency in run-of-river; real-scale applications. i