Simulation of water turbine integrated with electrical generator

Abstract

The paper presents the analysis of the small hydropower plant working at variable speed. The hydro-set that consists of the guide vanes and propeller turbine integrated with the permanent magnet synchronous generator is simulated by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in Ansys Fluent v18.0. The k-ϵ and k-ω SST models, as well as the one-equation Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model, were tested. The comparison showed the significant divergence of the calculation results. The turbulence model selection influences the average value of the power and also the speed for which the power is maximal.