The CFD-based simulation of a horizontal axis micro water turbine

Abstract

A horizontal axis micro water turbine generator has been designed for use as a source of power generation where the reservoir construction has only a low head. It uses the natural flow rate of water to generate a specific power output. The power is, however, limited by the flow rate of water which has to be sufficient to keep operating a suitable number of revolutions per minute for the blades. Tis research aimed to introduce a new blade can be disassembled and modular on the wheel blade and developing for optimum design of the horizontal axis micro water turbine generator. A 3D model of the wheel blade in the horizontal axis micro water turbine generator was created by using Autodesk Inventor Professional 2018 software. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis and structural Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are presented in this paper. CFD analysis was performed to obtain the velocity and pressure difference between the concave and convex regions of the wheel blade while FEA was used to obtain the structural response of the wheel blade due to the water velocity load applied in terms of stresses and displacements.