Numerical Study of the Cone Angle Effect on Conical Basin Gravitational Water Vortex Turbine

DOI

10.2991/aer.k.211106.075How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cone angle; Savonius; Vortex; Turbine

Abstract

Free vortex almost always occurs in open streams. The Gravitational Water Vortex Turbine (GWVT) is expected to extract energy from this phenomenon. The turbines are expected to be at the forefront of harnessing the potential of low hydro head energy. However, this effort needs to describe fluid motion in a vortex field, of course, which is very difficult. For the purpose of preliminary calculations for the GWVT design, a simple equation to calculate the vortex strength in a cylindrical vortex basin is available. Some researchers suggest using a conical basin. Therefore the flow pattern in the vortex field can no longer be predicted using these simple equations. The cone angle should be optimized. In this study, a performance comparison of conical basin GWVT with three variations of the conical angle, namely 15°, 20°, and 25°, was carried out. The runner used in this study was in the form of a conical Savonius Wind Turbine Blade (SWTB) with equal taper angles, which have 5 blades. Each blade is a segment of a cylinder, with a segment angle of 120° or one-third of the cylinder to form a 60° inlet angle. Rotary speed was selected at 60 rpm. The runner taper angle was equal to the cone angle of the basin. The runner sweep area for the three variations of the tapper angle was equal to maintain fair comparison. The method used to perform this comparison was CFD simulation because the vortex equations were no longer valid for the conical basins. The software used was ANSYS Fluent. Meanwhile, the solver used was steady-state 3D, pressure-based. The turbulence model used was SST k-ω for the area near the wall and free stream area. For meshing, the hexagonal form was used for all computation domains. The MRF (Multiple Reference Frame) technique was used for fluid flow near rotating blades. It was concluded, from this study, that the conical basin with a 15° cone angle gave the highest torque and shaft power.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press International B.V.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sugianto
AU  - Haryadi
AU  - Prasetyo
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/23
TI  - Numerical Study of the Cone Angle Effect on Conical Basin Gravitational Water Vortex Turbine
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Seminar of Science and Applied Technology (ISSAT 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 477
EP  - 484
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aer.k.211106.075
DO  - 10.2991/aer.k.211106.075
ID  - 2021
ER  -