Gravitational Water Vortex Turbine with Two Types of Runner Blades

Water vortex power plant (WVPP) utilises the natural behaviour of water to form the free surface water vortex for energy extraction. To the author’s finding, low efficiency was reported for WVPP systems. As part of the system, water vortex turbine contributes a big portion of the efficiency losses. It was selected as the main object of this study. The study on a water vortex turbine is by numerical and experimental methods. A basin and two replaceable turbine runners are fabricated to run the testing on the water vortex turbine. Numerical analysis is performed by using the commercial CFD tool, XFlow. The performance of the runners is studied by varying the operation speed and on two exit blade angles of the runner blades. The speed is varied by applying different external torques as the load. Two turbine runners with flat blades and curve blades respectively are tested