Sharif Digital Repository

Stay and guide vanes (distributor) are essential parts of a turbine. They are used to control the flow rate and to appropriately transfer the flow momentum to the runner. In this work, flow through the distributor is analyzed. For various Boundary Conditions (BC) and different configurations, threedimensional flows in the distributor of a Francis turbine are evaluated and compared with each other. The numerical simulations were carried out using Fluent software and the results were validated with a GAMM Francis turbine, where the geometry and detailed best efficiency measurements were publically available. In these simulations, the flow was assumed to be steady and the effect of turbulence... 

Overall turbine analysis requires large CPU time and computer memory, even in the present days. As a result, choosing an appropriate computational domain accompanied by a suitable boundary condition can dramatically reduce the time cost of computations. This work compares different geometries for numerical investigation of the 3D flow in the runner of a Francis turbine, and presents an optimum geometry with least computational effort and desirable numerical accuracy. The numerical results are validated with a GAMM Francis Turbine runner, which was used as a test case (GAMM workshop on 3D computation of incompressible internal flows, 1989) in which the geometry and detailed best efficiency...