Session: IMECE Undergraduate Research and Design Exposition

Paper Number: 115200

115200 - Design of a Small Sized Bulb Turbine Applied to Distributed Hydropower Generation, a Case Study. 

Paraguay has several important hydroelectric dams, two Binational and one national, that generate enough electric power to cover the country’s complete energy needs. However, according to estimates by the year of 2030 these will no longer be able to supply the country's complete demand. Large dam projects can cause irreversible environmental changes, over a very large geographic area, so they have the potential to cause significant negative impacts. Criticism of these projects has increased over the past decade. The most severe critics maintain that the social, environmental, and economic costs of these dams outweigh their benefits and therefore, the construction of large dams is not justified.

One of the alternatives to meet these future needs is the production of electricity on a smaller scale. Currently, Paraguay has its full power grid coming from large hydro power plants. This is simply because of this country’s river flow availability. Having water resources available on both sides of the Paraguay River, which covers several towns in the eastern and western region, as well as other water resources branches of the Paraná River, which covers the eastern region, the design of a small bulb turbine for distributed generation is a promising solution of a more effective use of renewable energy resource. Also, this type of hydraulic power generator doesn’t require water reservoir, therefore, it will produce a much lower environmental negative impact.

This presented work will focus on the design of this small bulb type turbine applied to low water flow volume rate. The water velocity was set to a value obtained from actual measurement of a standard small sized river in the eastern region of Paraguay. The implementation will be through turbines fixed at the bottom of a floating platform that will be anchored to the bottom of the river by means of dead weights. As per the boundary conditions used to run simulations, there were considered 15 kilometers per hour as fluid inlet velocity, 250 RPM as angular velocity of the rotating mesh at the runner blade region, water temperature at 20 degrees Celsius and 101325 Pa. standard ambient pressure.

The computational tool used for this analysis was a commercial software SolidWORKS Flow Simulation from Dassault Systemes. Results from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) showed a reasonable performance under the given boundary conditions, this is, around 70% efficiency. It is important to note here that a single-phase software was utilized to solve a Multiphysics problem, i. e., a Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI). Here is presented the procedure of characterization from which a series of CFD results is used to find the solution of this FSI problem.

Presenting Author: Aníbal Díaz Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción

Presenting Author Biography: Undergraduate student from the Electromechanical Engineering Department, junior year. He is also a reserve officer in mechanics at the naval aviation force.

Authors:

Luis Gusto Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Daniel Figueredo Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Francisco Gómez Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Aníbal Díaz Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Jorge Molinas Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Liz Esquivel Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción
Jorge Kurita Facultad de Ingeniería - Universidad Nacional de Asunción