Performance improvement of a micro impulse water turbine based on orthogonal array

Abstract

The study on structural design and efficiency improvement of the micro impulse water turbine with the super-low specific speed has rarely been reported in literature. In this paper, a micro impulse water turbine was optimized on the base of the orthogonal array of L18(37) with six factors. The range analysis and variance analysis were conducted to present the significance ranking of factors and the optimal combinations of factors, aiming to improve the water turbine efficiency taken as the experimental indicator in the orthogonal experiment. And then the optimal parameter combination for the water turbine was calculated by orthogonal experiment. Moreover, the internal flow field and hydraulic performance were simulated numerically to investigate the principle of performance improvement by comparing the optimized water turbine with the original. Also, the numerical method was verified by experimental result from performance tests of the original water turbine. As a result, the runner torque of the optimized water turbine was 13% higher than that of the original and the water turbine efficiency was improved by 5.8 percentage points at the rated operating condition.