| Description |
With current and ever increasing demands for energy, coupled with the limit on fossil fuels and their negative environmental impacts, there is a drive to harvest clean, renewable energy. One solution for harvesting clean energy includes hydraulic sources. Unfortunately, many methods for harvesting hydraulic energy result in environmental impacts of their own. One popular method consists of damming a water source. Although this method is efficient, it has its detrimental impacts. Some downfalls include restricting marine wildlife from venturing upstream for spawning, as well as flooding upstream land. Therefore, there is an additional push to develop a technology that can cleanly and efficiently harvest hydraulic energy with little to no impact on the environment. This project looks at the development of a helical turbine which harvests respectable amounts of energy in low-head hydro sources while creating virtually no impact on the environment. The scope of this project is two-fold. Modeling multiple turbine designs and quantifying their results would be beneficial in the design optimization process. While commercial software packages have the capabilities of solving such problems, they require extensive time and expertise to setup, solve, and analyze. However, by making a few assumptions, a computational model was developed that allowed for an accurate analysis of a turbine design as well as the quantitative comparison of multiple configurations. While sources of error from the assumptions did not allow for complete agreement between experimental and computational results, the computational analysis provided a valuable tool for understanding the dynamics behind the operation of these turbines and how different parameters affect the performance of the system. The study also includes experimentally optimizing the turbine for maximum power output. Multiple variables were tested including airfoil profile, the number of blades per turbine and the turbines' solidity. Due to not having a water channel which could meet the volume and velocity demands needed, a wind tunnel was used. Geometric and dynamic effects were scaled appropriately. Results from these tests were compared to the computational results for validity. The most efficient turbine design for this method of application was a 3 bladed, NACA-0022 with 55% solidity. |
