Numerical simulation of air injection in part load operating point

Abstract

The operation hydro turbines in the off-design operating points is often accompanied by pressure pulsations with a large amplitude. One way to deal with such pulsations is to inject the air into hydro turbine flow passage. The aim of this work is to simulate this process. Previously we carried out calculations in frames of homogeneous incompressible three-phase «liquid – vapor – non-condensable gas» mixture model. The computational domain consisted of wicket gate, runner and draft tube. The wicket gate and runner were considered in the periodic stage approach. The results obtained were in good agreement with experimental data at full load operating point. It was shown that the calculations on the previous model failed to accurately simulate influence of air flow rate on the amplitude and frequency of pressure pulsations in part load. Therefore the part load regime is studied carefully in this work: different computational domains are considered, different solvers are used, including ANSYS CFX and CADRUN, developed at the Institute of Computational Technologies. Different models of «liquid – gas» mixture are used in the calculations, compressibility is also taken into account. The flow rate of the injected air ranged from 0.5 to 2 percent of the water flow rate. The influence of the injected air on the flow pattern, including the vortex rope, is investigated. The results obtained are compared with experimental data.