Hydraulic design of hydraulic turbine based on blade loading control through three-dimensional inverse design method

In this paper, a three-dimensional inverse design method was applied to design a hydraulic turbine and numerical simulation investigations were performed to study the effects of different blade loading on the hydraulic performances of the turbine. The paper will define blade loading as three kinds of circulation distributions named fore-loaded distribution, mid-loaded distribution and rear-loaded distribution respectively on both the hub and shroud of the impeller, which were applied as the input conditions for the inverse design method to calculate the blade shapes. Nine different blade loading distributions combining with the meridianl geometry of the turbine were investigated. The flows through all the designed impellers were computed numerically by a three-dimensional steady numerical simulation with shear-stress-transport kω (SST k-ω) turbulence model. Analysis of the numerical results indicated that performance of the impeller with fore-loaded blade loading distribution is the best, which is useful for hydraulic turbine impeller design applications.