Reliability Study of Ultra Z-Blade Water Turbine for Pico-Hydro System with Low Head and Low Flow Water Resources

Abstract

The term "pico-hydro" refers to hydropower that has an output of no more than 5 kW. This method has an advantage over large-scale hydropower systems in that it can extract electrical energy sources from even a small stream of water. It is interesting to note that there is not yet a hydro reaction type water turbine that has been developed commercially and is suitable for usage in low-head and low-flow places. In this work, an Ultra Z-Blade reaction type turbine is used to introduce a pico-hydro system, and the critical design parameters are demonstrated through an exploratory method (U-ZBT). For both ideal and real-world scenarios, numerical simulations and their solutions are described here. The development of the equations uses the ideas of mass, momentum, and energy conservation. The output power (W), rotor angular speed (ω), turbine radius (R), and torque (T) can all be specified. An instrumentation diagram that was utilized during the testing of the U-ZBT prototype is included in the documentation to help explain the experimental techniques. Both the mathematical model and the experimental findings have shown that the U-ZBT has a higher level of performance at operational water heads as low as 5m and ultra-low mass flow rates as low as 1.77 L/sec. In addition to this, it can achieve rotational speeds of up to 130 rpm, has a high efficiency of 66 %, and is capable of producing high mechanical power of roughly 60 watts.