Abstract
In order to significantly improve the efficiency of driving water turbine used in hose reel irrigator, a new water turbine structure was proposed by the method of performance test and numerical calculation. The internal flow characteristics of original water turbine were analyzed, and it was found that unreasonable design of main flow passage components such as inlet, outlet and runner could not effectively translated pressure energy of upper stream into impact kinetic energy of blade, and gave rise to low energy conversion efficiency of water turbine. The inadequate internal flow and uneven pressure distribution were also not conducive to energy conversion efficiency. Then a new structure of water turbine structure was presented, in which the inlet has a tangential nozzle jet and the outlet is in axial direction. The computational analysis showed that the nozzle jet at the inlet of the new water turbine runner, which makes jet flow mainly concentrate in the impacted blade passage, can reduce the loss of flow kinetic energy. The axial outflow increases the distance of inflow in the runner, which is more conducive to the runner blades work. Performance experiments on both original and new water turbines showed that the highest efficiency of the new turbine is almost 20 percentages higher than that of the original turbine, and the new turbine is nearly triple output power over the original turbine. The internal flow characteristic analysis and the performance experiment were conducted to assess the feasibility of the replacement of the original water turbine by the new water turbine. Keywords: micro-sized water turbine, hose reel irrigator, optimization design, experimental study, numerical analysis DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20181105.2876 Citation: Tang L D, Yuan S Q, Tang Y, Yan H F. Performance experiment and numerical prediction on the optimization design of the micro-sized water turbine for the hose reel irrigator. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2018; 11(5): 108–115.
Highlights
Sprinkling irrigation is an effective water-saving irrigation method
In order to significantly improve the efficiency of driving water turbine used in hose reel irrigator, a new water turbine structure was proposed by the method of performance test and numerical calculation
The output shaft power of this turbine ranges from 20 W to 250 W with the working water head increasing from 13 m to 30 m, while the rotational speed of the turbine shaft increases from 100 r/min to 600 r/min
Summary
The water evaporating in the sprinkling irrigation changes the climate of the farmland to restrain plant transpiration and soil evaporation effectively to improve the rate of the water-resource use[1,2]. Sprinkling irrigation has positive effect on improvement of salinized soil by salt leaching[3,4]. The hose reel irrigator has good mobility, high automation and high adaptability to sprinkle the different-sized fields. The hose reel irrigator came into use in Europe in the 1960s and is still used today, the manufacturing enterprises concentrate mainly in Italy, Austria, France and Germany[7,8]. The traditional hose reel irrigator was mainly composed of sprinkler cart, water pipe, hose, driving device (water turbine), gear box, and so on
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