Pumps used as turbines power recovery, energy efficiency, CFD analysis

As the global demand for energy grows, numerous studies in the field of energy efficiency are stimulated, and one of them is certainly the use of pumps in turbine operating mode. In order to reduce time necessary to determine pump characteristic in turbine operating mode problem was studied by computational fluid dynamics approach. The paper describes various problems faced during modeling (pump and turbine mode) and the approaches used to resolve the problems. Since in the majority of applications, the turbine is a pump running in reverse, many attempts have been made to predict the turbine performance from the known pump performance, but only for best efficiency point. This approach does not provide reliable data for the design of the system with maximum energy efficiency and does not allow the determination of the head for a wide range of flow rates. This paper presents an example of centrifugal norm pump operating in both (pump and turbine) regime and comparison of experimentally obtained results and computational fluid dynamics simulations. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. TR33040: Revitalization of existing and designing new micro and mini hydropower plants (from 100 to 1000 kW) in the territory of South and Southeast Serbia