Experimental study on vortex intensification of gravitational water vortex turbine with novel conical basin

Abstract

Water vortex turbine became a major research interest in the area of renewable energy technologies due to the ability to work at low heads and flow rate. Many types of research are done in this area but all the work is done till date focused on the various geometric parameters of the basins, runner types and their positions in the basins and studying their respective effects. This work focused on the intensification of water vortex in the conical basin which affects the vortex strength which is critical in increasing the efficiency of the turbine. In this study, the five types of conical basins with vortex intensifier nozzles namely set I, set II, set III, set IV and set V are considered and the effect of orientation, alignment, and position of these intensifier nozzles in the basins are studied experimentally. The experimental results obtained in this study and the results mentioned in the work of Dhakal et al. are compared to characterize the efficiency of the novel basins proposed in this study. From the results of this study, it was found that the vortex turbine with proposed set III configuration basin shows an increase in torque by 57.77%, the power output by 54.42% and efficiency by 54.41% respectively over the vortex turbine with Dhakal et al. configuration. It was found that the intensifying nozzles strengthen the vortex formation in the conical basin and thus increased the efficiency of the turbine.