Design of a Francis Turbine for a Small Hydro Power Project in Turkey

Many hydro power plants, both in small and large scales, are being constructed in Turkey. The total potential of these projects reach to 216 billion kWh of feasible energy. However a method was not yet developed for the design of hydraulic machinery equipment in Turkey. In order to accomplish the hydraulic turbine design without any prior information than the design parameters of the hydraulic project, a methodology is developed. This methodology involves the use of computational tools and it is applied for small hydro projects. This methodology is a parametric design-optimization procedure which consists of parametric geometry modeling, computational fluid dynamics analysis and structural verification.Copyright © 2010 by ASME