Performance Study of a Lucid Spherical Rotor

Abstract

Nowadays, world population is growing very rapidly and need for electricity is rising. Due to adverse influence of non-renewable fuels exploitation on public health, global electricity need for renewable energies is predicted to rise. Hydraulic energy has got a growing interest as one of the clean and renewable energies. Cross flow turbines are more preferred in small-scale hydropower generations. Due to rising cost incurred in experimental studies of the design process of cross flow turbines, researchers have adopted numerical methods mainly CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) technique. In fact, the CFD method allows to find out the hydrodynamic specifics as well as the fluid stream behavior near a water rotor as that are hardly evaluated based on experimental tests. Within this study, one of the most used CFD package, the Ansys Fluent 17.0 has been employed to resolve the transient incompressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations and to analyze the impact of the dimension of the rotating domain on the numerical study of a Lucid water rotor. The validation of the numerical model with previous investigations has been fulfilled to choose the adequate rotating domain size. The hydrodynamic specifics of the flow near a Lucid spherical rotor (LSR) have been analyzed and discussed.