Implementing Truss Elements for Ensuring Structural Integrity on the Blade of Up-scaled Gravitational Water Vortex Turbine
Author(s):
Khubaib Bin Ehsan†, Babar khan†, Muhammad Ahsan Jabbar†, Adnan Aslam Noon†, Javed Ahmed Khan Tipu†, Muhammad Arif†, Aamer Sharif‡, Muftooh Ur Rehman Siddiqi‡†
Affiliation(s):
†Department of Mechanical Engineering, FET, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
‡ Department of Mechanical Engineering, CECOS University of IT and Emerging Science, Peshawar, Pakistan.
‡† Mechanical, Biomedical and Design Engineering Department, School of Engineering and Technology, Aston University, England.
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Gravitational water vortex turbine is a low-head renewable hydropower technology that enables a clean & green energy generation. Since it utilizes artificial vortex generation for its advantage, therefore it births a complex curvature blade profile. Using sheet metal for an up-scaled model has the tendency of deforming to such an extent that the design fails i.e., turbine collides with the basin walls. Moreover, the use of casting or any other manufacturing process significantly increases the capital cost of the system. In the present study, truss elements is implemented on a complex blade profile to improve the structural integrity of turbine so that it can be used for an up-scaled of Gravitational water vortex turbine. Iterating different designs by either changing the type of truss or re-orienting the trusses have been studied in order to find the most optimal solution where both the required structural integrity is ensured and it does not block much of the incoming flow. The results shows that for a 1 m diameter turbine, the most optimal design configuration which came out was using two circular rods of 12 mm diameter and one 25 mm wide L shaped rectangular bar resulting in a 14x reduced deformations with only 18.36% flow area blocked from the initial no-truss design.