Design and Year-Long Performance Evaluation of a Pump as Turbine (PAT) Pico-Hydropower Energy Recovery Device in a Water Network

Abstract

Despite the existence of a vast scientific literature on the subject of hydraulic energy recovery from water pipelines by means of micro- and pico-hydropower using pumps as turbines (PAT), such technology has found a very limited application thus far in practice. In fact, the selection of a pump as turbine for a specific site is a matter of nontrivial trade-offs between a variety of technical and economic parameters and this aspect has not been sufficiently captured and integrated into a reliable, proven, and practical selection methodology available to designers and practitioners. Hence, a multi-objective PAT selection software was developed and utilized to design a 3 kW energy recovery installation at a rural Irish water network. The performance of the scheme was monitored over 13 consecutive months, resulting in the generation of nearly 16,000 kWh of electricity and validating the output from the PAT selection software.