Effect of Stator Geometry on the Performance of a Positive Displacement Hydraulic Turbine

Abstract

Positive displacement turbine (PDT) is a special class of hydraulic turbine which finds its usage in the applications involving very low flow rates with high heads and very low specific speeds. In the present case, a PDT was designed and developed to replace the pressure differential control valve (PDCV) and to harness the unused differential pressure energy from the water supply pipeline system. The turbine was designed considering the on-site available head and flowrate. The rotors were twisted to damp the fluctuations in pressure, flow rate and torque. The primary objective of the present study was to analyze the effect of the stator shape on the performance of PDT using Computational Fluid Dynamics approach. The governing equations of the fluid flow were solved using an unsteady approach to capture accurately the pulsating nature of the flow using ANSYS CFX v17.1. Initially a circular stator turbine was used for transporting the working fluid to and from the turbine rotors and later the effects of square and rectangular shaped stator designs were also checked. It was observed that the performance of the PDT slightly improved with rectangular and square stators in terms of hydraulic efficiency than with circular stator with low flow fluctuations.