CFD analyses and performance comparison of micro-hydropowder plants

Abstract

The project concerns the hydropower renewable energy technology at its micro scale: thanks to an internship performed with the Belgian startup TurbulentHydro, the purpose of this Master Thesis is to evaluate the energy performance of 2 di erent models currently under investigation: the so-called Flatblades and Streamlines con gurations. These layouts are similar in shape but di erent both in dimension and for the turbine used. After a little introduction on renewable energies and hydropower technology, the selected CFD simulation procedure and all its options have been explained as well as the choice of the turbulence model to apply, computing the meaningful parameters to add in the model. This dissertation highlights the uid dynamics behaviour by means of suitable softwares for this purpose: Autodesk Inventor, the 3D CAD mechanical design software in order to build, and edit when necessary, the geometries of the models considered, MeshMixer, a state-of-art software for locally adjusting the mesh of the starting model and OpenFOAM, a free and open source CFD program in order to run and evaluate any details of the analysis, simulating the operation conditions by means of its components and tools. Eventually, the most important CFD results are presented. Di erent con gurations bring di erent results. Regarding Flatblades model, the scope was re ned the CFD initial setup in order to achieve results as close to the real case validation as possible whereas, for Streamlines model, an additional new component has been added for improving the current design in terms of energy output at the turbine level. At the end, conclusions stated possible re nements and improvements for these simulations as well as uncertainties arose from the results that might be avoided for the next stages.