In the last decades, hydraulic turbines have experienced the increase of their power density and the extension of their operating range, leading the fluid and mechanical dynamic effects to become significantly more pronounced. The understanding of the transient fluid flow and of the associated unsteady effects is essential for the reduction of the pressure pulsation level and improvement of the machine dynamic behaviour. In this study, the instationary fluid flow through the complete turbine was numerically calculated for an existing Francis machine with high specific speed. The hybrid turbulence models DES (detached eddy simulation) and SAS (scale adaptive simulation) allowed the accurate simulation of complex dynamic flow effects, such as the rotor-stator-interaction and the draft tube instabilities. Different operating conditions, as full load, part load, higher part load and deep part load, were successfully simulated and showed very tight agreement with the experimental results from the model tests. The transient pressure field history, obtained from the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation and stored for each time step, was used as input for the full instationary FEA (finite element analysis) of turbine components. The assessment of the machine dynamic motion also offered the possibility to contribute to the understanding of the pressure pulsation effects and to further increase the turbine stability. This research project was developed at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics of the TU München.


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