Design, Manufacturing and Experimental Investigation of Pico-Power Hydrokinetic Turbine
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Date
2021-09
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Ethiopia has plenty of rivers and groundwater sources in the countryside which have the potential to generate electricity from Pico up to Mega power. There is a hydrokinetic turbine technology to generate green energy using river flow water. The gap is to interact with this technology and energy resource of water. The cost of imported equipment for this technology is expensive as well as the available equipment is mostly for large-scale hydropower energy conversion technology projects. This study aims to design, manufacture locally available material and experimental investigation of Pico power hydrokinetic turbine to grasp energy from the river water resource. The hydrokinetic turbine is the systems class of “zero-head” hydropower whereby energy is extracted from the kinetic energy of flowing water, similar to wind turbines, rather than the potential energy of falling water. The method to do this research includes optimizing the geometry of the turbine blade and force analysis of the blade using Ansys software. The blade was manufactured with a 3D printer and the mechanical components were manufactured in the workshop of the school of mechanical and industrial engineering. The test was conducted in four setups at different water velocities. The results are AC RMS value of 11.33Amp and RMS value of voltage 6.89volt respectively with the motor revolution of 486.75 rpm. The power coming from the experiment showed that it is sensitive to current and they have the same sinusoidal pattern plotting the results within each interval of seconds. The net power can be obtained from the turbine was 128.37 watts. The efficiency of the turbine is 51.48%.
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Keywords
Hydrokinetic turbine, wind turbine, zero head, hydropower, energy conversion