An experimental study of the flow in a sharp-heel Kaplan draft tube

Sammanfattning: This research project was originally part of a package (Turbine-99 Draft Tube) that had a mutual goal, to improve the understanding of draft tube flow and establish Best Practise Guidelines for simulation of draft tube flow. The draft tube is situated after the runner in a Hydropower turbine to recover as much of the remaining head and kinetic energy as possible before the water leaves the turbine. The case is fully turbulent, and because of the adverse pressure gradient with risk for separation, periodic inlet conditions from the runner with different degrees of swirl causes the draft tube flow to be difficult to predict. Therefore, unambiguous design criterions are lacking, and the slightly contradicting recommendations indicate that the standard rules give conservative, rather than optimal, designs. This thesis gives some background on draft-tube flows in general and discusses the parameters and flow conditions relevant to the Turbine-99 draft tube in some detail. The main goal of the thesis is to provide extensive experimental data on a well-defined sharp-heel draft-tube flow. The data bank has served as validation data for the simulation challenge presented by the Turbine-99 workshops in Porjus (June 1999), Älvkarleby (June 2001) and Porjus (December 2005). The experimental data and some numerical results are also available as an application challenge in the Qnet database (managed by Ercoftac), as a validation case for flow simulations. The experimental data consists of visualisations, pressure measurements and velocity measurements. These methods give a good qualitative picture of the flow pattern in the draft tube with quantitative data at selected cross section that can be used to validate the flow simulations. The first two workshops focused on mean quantities of pressure and velocities; however, phase resolved measurements have been added to add value to the experimental data. In addition to the experimental validation case, there is one paper that deals with loads on the draft tube, which affect the construction lifetime. Since the hydropower stations are expected to have a long total technical lifetime with a number of refurbishments, these questions will grow in importance over the next decades.