Development and Implementation of a Methodology for Reverse Engineering Design of Francis Turbine Runners

Kutay Çelebioğlu,Alper Kaplan

doi:10.5505/pajes.2018.43959

Abstract

Development and Implementation of a Methodology for Reverse Engineering Design of Francis Turbine Runners

Highlights

Traditional reverse engineering steps are combined with the basics and flow dynamics of hydraulic turbines and applied to two different turbine runners of two different hydroelectric power plants in operation
The methodology is first verified by application on the first runner and utilized for the redesign of the runner of another power plant
Hydraulic turbines that are used for energy generation in hydroelectric power plants are divided into two groups based on their working principles as reaction and impulse type turbines

Summary

Introduction

Hydraulic turbines that are used for energy generation in hydroelectric power plants are divided into two groups based on their working principles as reaction and impulse type turbines. Free formed surfaces are fit to point cloud data that is obtained from scanning in order to develop a solid model. Francis type hydraulic turbine runners have complex blade shapes which should be designed with special design software, based on the solution of three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations. It is necessary to develop a reverse engineering design methodology for the redesign of the turbines for the rehabilitation of existing hydroelectric power plants. In addition to traditional reverse engineering methodology, it is important to be able to obtain analyzable blade geometry from the solid model and to determine the blade design parameters from the existing turbines. A reverse engineering methodology is developed for the redesign of turbines for the rehabilitation of existing power plants. The reasons for the reduced performance are examined considering the new inverse engineering design methodology and a rehabilitation study is performed to increase the performance

Reverse engineering design methodology

Computational fluid dynamics analysis of the reverse engineering geometries

Discussion and Conclusions

Result