Análisis de la eficiencia de una turbina tipo francis con características similares a la de la central hidroeléctrica San Francisco-Ecuador

Abstract

One of the major challenges in the field of electrical generation by hydraulic means is to measure the impact of the wear caused by water on the global efficiency of the machine. In this context, the aim of this work is analyze the efficiency of a Francis-type turbine that belongs to San Francisco Hydroelectric Plant (Ecuador) for different gap dimensions between the guide vanes and the facing plates using CFD. To carry out this study was necessary to obtain real information from the operating conditions and geometry of the entire turbine. It was necessary to study the sediments of Pastaza River’s water since these residues cause an accelerated deterioration of the components, the three-dimensional survey of all the elements of the turbine was carried out starting from 2D drawings provided by CELEC EP HIDROAGOYÁN, In addition we reverse engineering was performed by 3D scanning of all elements with complex geometries such as the impeller and guide vanes and thus to generate the complete geometry to obtain the computational domain for running the simulation of the efficiency by numerical methods using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methodology. For the simulation, the k-epsilon turbulence model was used since it requires a lower computational cost and does not need a generation of structured mesh to obtain good results. With this study, it was possible to determine the real value of the efficiency with the current model of the turbine with a reliability of 90% in the simulation.