Experimental Investigation and Optimization of Floating Blade Water Wheel Turbine Performance Using Taguchi Method and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)

Abstract

Floating blade water wheel turbine is a development design of goose leg turbine which has been studied in the previous year. This water turbine has a specialty on its blade ability that can open and close like a goose leg. This study employed the Taguchi method to obtain the optimum design parameters on the floating blade water wheel turbine. There were 3 factors used, they are water flow rate with 4 levels (35; 40; 45; 50 l/min), number of buckets with 2 levels (4 and 6 units), and the shape of the blade with 2 levels (concave and flat) which was predicted to affect the turbine performance. The response or dependent variable used was the turbine efficiency. According to factors and levels that have been determined, orthogonal array used in this study is L16. Orthogonal Array is a matrix that used in Taguchi method to determine the minimum number of experiments that can provide information about factors which affect the parameter response. According to ANOVA results, they indicated the factors affecting the optimum quality characteristics of the turbine performance are the number of buckets with the contribution of 68.13%, the blade shape with the contribution of 23.28%, water flow rate with the contribution of 7.35%, and the 1, 25% is the other factors. According to Taguchi method, the optimum parameter design was a turbine with 6 blades, convex blade shape, and water flow rate at 50 l/m that yielded turbine efficiency as much as 3.999%.