Modeling and numerical investigation on multi-objective design improvement of a novel cross-flow lift-based turbine for in-pipe hydro energy harvesting applications

摘要

This research is about an energy harvesting in-pipe system that generates electricity from excess pressure of the water flow in gravity-fed pipelines. These systems consist of multiple spherical lift-based turbines. The turbine configuration was modeled and fully parameterized to some design factors that can be changed in a code-based design. The physical concepts of the turbine were thoroughly analyzed to obtain a profound perception of the effect of each geometric parameter on the turbine performance. The performance improvement was investigated based on three metrics, namely the power coefficient, the probability of cavitation, and the pressure coefficient using a numerical analysis validated with some performed experiments. This validation indicates that the chosen numerical approach is reasonably reliable for turbine performance prediction with errors of less than 8%, approximately. The optimizable geometric model of the turbine, the highly accurate numerical method, and the analytical investigation developed in this study make available essential data for related studies.