HydroFlex presentation at 15th Asian International Conference on Fluid Machinery

HydroFlex PhD Candidate Jesline Joy (LTU) participated in the 15th Asian International Conference on Fluid Machinery in September 2019. It was organised by the Korean society of fluid machinery (KSFM) in Busan, South Korea, and covered all major areas related to fluid machinery like hydro-turbines, gas turbines, pumps, compressors etc.

“It was a wonderful experience to interact with experts in hydro-turbines and learn about the research in their respective fields“, says Jesline Joy, who presented her work titled ‘Numerical Study on Reduced Francis-99 Turbine Model during Part Load Operation’ at the conference. In her research, she focuses specifically on the rotating vortex rope (RVR) and how it is affecting the performance of hydro-turbines at off-design conditions.

The paper presented at the conference highlights the need for effective long-term solutions to mitigation (or at least suppress) RVR. Such research, which is related to the study and development of new designs and optimizations of hydro-turbines, is preferably performed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. CFD is a powerful tool for the design and development of vortex control methods as it is possible to analyse all parameters defined during the study which could be challenging to study with experiments.

In the paper, the computational study is restricted to the draft tube of the Francis-99 turbine and the numerical results were validated against the experimental results. The paper is important as it sets the foundation for new design prospects, which Jesline Joy will further investigate in her PhD project. She intends to develop an effective design which mitigates RVR and increases the pressure recovery in the draft tube.

The paper will be soon be available.

Reference: Joy, J., Dekhordi, M.R., & Cervantes M. J. (2019), ‘Numerical Study on Reduced Francis-99 Turbine Model during Part Load Operation’. In conference proceedings of 15th Asian International Conference on Fluid Machinery, Busan, South Korea.