Effect of cone on efficiency improvement of a self-powered IoT-based hydro turbine

Abstract

This study aims to improve the power generation performance of the self-powered IoT turbine flowmeter developed in our previous study. To achieve this, a cone was installed at the front-center of the rotor to accelerate the water flow and streamline the resulting high-speed flow toward the blade near the periphery of the rotor. The experiments and flow simulations served to explore the effects of the cone on the characteristics of the flowmeter. The results demonstrate that both the power generated by the cone-equipped rotor and the pressure loss increases with increasing cone diameter [Formula: see text], Consequently, the power efficiency is maximum at [Formula: see text] D = 0.375, where D is the outer diameter of the blade. The pressure difference between the front and rear of the blade for the cone-equipped rotor with [Formula: see text] D = 0.375 is significantly larger than that of the rotor without the cone. This pressure difference increases the torque acting on the blade, which increases the rotational speed and output of the rotor. In addition to the improvement in performance, the introduction of the cone facilitates flowrate measurement because it enables the relationship between the flowrate and the rotational speed of the rotor to be expressed as a linear function.