Velocity Field Analysis of a Channel Narrowed by Spur-dikes to Maximize Power Output of In-stream Turbines

Abstract

The electrification of rural and remote areas is sometimes very hard to achieve, due to the distances to the main power source
That’s the main focus of this study, to verify if some structures, in this case bank protection structures by the name of spur-dikes, change the velocity profiles in a way that can be used by hydro power generation devices and to achieve that, numerical simulations were conducted, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software Ansys Fluent, where three cases with simple spur-dikes with different orientations in the channel were tested and compared with other case without spur-dikes so a conclusion can be reached if the behaviour of the water flow is similar to channel narrowing
The results show that this case is not as aggressive to the bend as the standard spur-dike as it was expected and the velocity in the inside was not of as high order