Perpustakaan Digital ITB

At present, due to energy crisis circumstances, renewable energy becomes the suitable choice of national energy. Hydropower is a clean source of renewable energy. Especially small hydropower, the renewable energy which still has large potential and low cost of installation. The turbine of this project is designing and simulation of a low head axial hydraulic turbine around 2m due to its low cost, small-sized, the materials used in construction are cheap and the technologies involved are conventional. The methodology of this project consists of designing blades from cascade modelling and set up for a simulation for analysis using Computational fluid dynamics which are compared to the fundamental calculations. The simulations are done in various rotational speeds and mass flow from a model of turbine designed from Solidworks to obtain the desired design power around 5-8 kW and used to determined its efficiencies. The results of the simulations show at a rotational speed of 355 rpm and 300 kg/s the efficiency is 73.62 % whereas the fundamental calculations result in 78.6 % efficiency. This shows there are other variables that can affect the results of the simulations and the performance of the turbine.