The Study on Performance of Drag Based Water Turbine under Non-immersive Condition

Abstract

As electricity plays a paramount role in modern life, the electric power outage is always considered to be a serious problem. For this purpose, our research focuses on improving the efficiency of water turbine. By studying the effects of the number and curvature of turbine blades and stimulating water faucet, the water turbine is expected to effectively boost the rotation under non-immersive condition. The goal of the study is to improve the blade design for higher efficiency of the turbine. This project presents the research of performance on drag based water turbine. The water turbine, whose whole structure is exposed in the air, in the research is an alternative for conventional immersed water turbine. The size of the water turbine is relatively small compared with industry size. Incoming water can be from any direction. The water turbine displays certain advantageous perspectives. Following the past experiments about this device, a myriad of developments has made over years. The blades of drag based water turbine have been tested with numerous combinations and permutations; thus, the effective choices of blade curvature decided in the research are one-quarter of a circle, one-third of a circle and half a circle, with the arc lengths and thicknesses to be the same. Besides, the number of blades in different experiments are 2, 3, 4 respectively. The incoming flow rate is expected to be constant, even though it fluctuates between 5.45 LPM and 5.95 LPM because of limited experiment equipment. Effects of blade number and curvature are examined, and corresponding conclusions are made.