The paper briefly describes the methodology adopted to develop an inherently silt resistant Francis turbine runner. Erosion on a runner is numerically evolved using the modern CFD tools and its performance parameters are also evaluated. The performance parameters have also been verified by experimentally model testing the runner. A new runner with performance parameters quite similar to the original runner and silt erosion coefficient reduced by almost 40% has been developed. The number of blades of the final variant has also been reduced from 15 to 13 by optimizing the cost between silt erosion losses and loss in efficiencies. Thus the total volume of material removal due to silt erosion drops down by approximately 50%.
展开▼
