On the dynamic measurements of hydraulic characteristics

The present work introduces the implementation and validation of a faster method to measure experimentally the efficiency characteristics of hydraulic turbomachines at a model scale on a test rig. The case study is represented by a laboratory prototype of an in-line axial microturbine for water supply networks. The 2.65 kW one-stage variable speed turbine, composed by one upstream 5-blade runner followed by one counter-rotating downstream 7-blade runner, has been installed on the HES-SO Valais/Wallis universal test rig dedicated to assess performances of small hydraulic machinery following the IEC standard recommendations. In addition to the existing acquisition/control system of the test rig used to measure the 3D hill-chart of a turbine by classical static point-by-point method, a second digitizer has been added to acquire synchronized dynamic signals of the employed sensors. The optimal acceleration/deceleration ramps of the electrical drives have been previously identified in order to cope with the purpose of a reduced measurement time while avoiding errors and hysteresis on the acquired hydraulic characteristics. Finally, the comparison between the turbine efficiency hill-charts obtained by dynamic and static point-by-point methods shows a very good agreement in terms of precision and repeatability. Moreover, the applied dynamic method reduces significantly (by a factor of up to ten) the time necessary to measure the efficiency characteristics on model testing