Strategies employed in the design and optimization of pump as turbine runner

Abstract

The low hydraulic efficiency of the pump as turbine (PAT) poses a major challenge to the runner design. This paper introduces a new strategy for designing and optimizing the performance of PAT runner. The strategy process is mainly divided into four steps, namely blade parametric design, significance evaluation of parameters, construction of optimizing surrogate model and optimization of improved PSO algorithm. Compared with the current design methodologies, not only does this optimization strategy propose the system design and optimization process, but also it breaks down the process into well-defined steps and simplifies them. The hydraulic efficiency of PAT optimized by this optimization strategy reaches 84.76%, which improves 3.93%. A test bench has been built to test the optimizing strategy. The maximum difference of experimental data is 1.5%, which meets the requirements of practical engineering application, and verifies the reliability of the optimization strategy process. The optimizing strategy process can be extended to apply to pump, fan, conventional turbine and other blade fluid models, and it can be further extended to apply to the optimization design of 3D blades with a high specific speed.