Numerical and Experimental Investigations for Design of a High Performance Micro-hydro-kinetic Turbine

Design and manufacturing of a high performance micro-hydro-kinetic turbine is discussed in the present paper. The main goal is manufacturing an equipped experimental model of hydro-kinetic turbine with highest energy absorption from water current. A multi-shape ducted turbine comprised of a multi-part diffuser was manufactured that can be converted to many experimental models for studying various diffuser enhancing effects. Turbine's rotor included a three-blade axial propeller and a mixed six-blade propeller with high power coefficient. Simple experiments on propeller were performed for flow visualization, torque measurement and illustrating dynamic balance at high speed rotation in air and water. Important data for design and manufacturing of duct and rotor components that led to safe structure and balanced the rotor at high speed rotations were discussed. For dynamic simulation of turbine, a user-defined function was developed for ANSYS-FLUENT software that collects integration data and solves rotor's dynamic equation in one-degree of freedom motion. Many stable dynamic simulation methods for coupling with transient one-dimensional flow around one-degree of freedom propellers were proposed and the numerical results were validated against full CFD data.