The Effect of the Ratio of the Hub Diameter (d) to the Diameter of the Screw (D) to the Performance of the Archimides Screw

Abstract

The potency of the ultra-low head hydro resource is quite huge in the world. In Indonesia, only 1.8% of the Pico hydro potency with head of less than 5m is utilized as electric resource [1]. Archimedes screw is one of the promising technology that could be used to extract this low head hydro resource. One prominent factor which is affecting the performance of the Archimedes turbine screw is the ratio of the hub diameter (d) to the diameter of the screw (D). In this paper, the ratio d/D were varied as 0.22, 0.29, 0.33, 0.42. In addition, flow rate (Q), were varied as well as 1.8 l/s, 1.4 l/s, 1.0 l/s. The blade configuration that used in this test is a single blade. The result shows that the highest efficiency is achieved with the diameter ratio of d/D = 0.42 with the eficiency off 40.23%.