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Reversible pump turbines are the only means to store primary energy in an highly efficient way. Within a short time their operation can be switched between the different operational regimes thus enhancing the stabilization of the electric grid. These qualities in combination with the operation even at off-design conditions offer a high flexibility to the energy market. However, pump turbines pass through operational regimes where their behaviour becomes unstable. One of these effects occurs when the flowrate is decreased continuously down to a minimum. This point is the physical limitation of the pump operation and is very difficult to predict properly by numerical design without a model test. The purpose of the present study is to identify the fluid mechanical phenomena leading to the occurrence of instabilities of pump turbines in pump mode. A reduced scale model of a ANDRITZ pump turbine was installed on a 4-quadrant test rig for the experimental investigation of unstable conditions in pump mode. The performed measurements are based on the IEC60193-standard. Characteristic measurements at a single guide vane opening were carried out to get a detailed insight into the instabilities in pump mode. The interaction between runner and guide vane was analysed by Particle Image Velocimetry. Furthermore, high-speed visualizations of the suction side part load flow and the suction recirculation were performed. Like never before the flow pattern in the draft tube cone became visible with the help of a high-speed camera by intentionally caused cavitation effects which allow a qualitative view on the flow pattern in the draft tube cone. Suction recirculation is observed in form of single vortices separating from each runner blade and stretching into the draft tube against the main flow direction. To find an explanation for the flow phenomena responsible for the appearance of the unstable head curve also characteristic velocity distributions on the pressure side were combined with high-speed visualizations on the suction side of the pump turbine model. The results enhance the comprehension of the physical background leading to the instability and improve the numerical predictability of the instability in pump mode.

Performance characteristics in pump mode of pump-turbines are vital for the safe and effective operation of pumped storage power plants. They are resultant of Euler head (power input) and hydraulic losses (power dissipation). In this paper, 3-D steady simulations were performed under 13mm, 19mm and 25mm guide vane openings (GVOs). Three groups of operating points under the three GVOs were chosen based on experimental validation to investigate the influence of guide vane setting on flow patterns upstream and downstream. Analysed results show that, the guide vane setting will obviously change the flow pattern downstream, which in turn influences the flow upstream. It shows a strong effect on hydraulic losses in guide and stay vanes. In addition, at the large part load conditions, the change of GVO will increase the relative flow angle at the runner outlet. As a consequence, it decreases the Euler head. However, at other operating conditions, it only has a little influence on Euler head. Flow patterns in pump mode are very dependent on the GVO and discharge.

The performance discontinuity of a pump-turbine under pumping mode is harmful to stable operation of units in hydropower station. In this paper, the performance discontinuity phenomenon of the pump-turbine was studied by means of experiment and numerical simulation. In the experiment, characteristics of the pump-turbine with different diffuser vane openings were tested in order to investigate the effect of pumping casing to the performance discontinuity. While other effects such as flow separation and rotating stall are known to have an effect on the discontinuity, the present studied test cases show that prerotation is the dominating effect for the instability, positions of the positive slope of characteristics are almost the same in different diffuser vane opening conditions. The impeller has principal effect to the performance discontinuity. In the numerical simulation, CFD analysis of tested pump-turbine has been done with k-ω and SST turbulence model. It is found that the position of performance curve discontinuity corresponds to flow recirculation at impeller inlet. Flow recirculation at impeller inlet is the cause of the discontinuity of characteristics curve. It is also found that the operating condition of occurrence of flow recirculation at impeller inlet is misestimated with k-ω and SST turbulence model. Furthermore, the original SST model has been modified. We predict the occurrence position of flow recirculation at impeller inlet correctly with the modified SST turbulence model, and it also can improve the prediction accuracy of the pump- turbine performance at the same time.

The relations between the runaway stability characteristics and the flow patterns inside the runner of pump-turbine are supposed to be close and should be studied. The runaway processes of a model pump-turbine at four guide-vane openings (GVOs) were simulated by the three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics. The results show that the runaway stability characteristics for the pump-turbine are different at different GVOs. For the small GVOs, the turbine characteristic trajectory undergoes damped oscillations; however, for large GVOs, the turbine characteristic trajectory settles into an un-damping oscillation. The evolution features of the reverse flow vortex structures (RFVS) at the runner inlet during the runaway oscillations have distinct patterns between the small and large GVOs. For small GVOs, the RFVSs only locate at the mid-span; however, for the large GVOs, the location of the RFVSs switches back and forth between the mid-span section and the hub side when the turbine passes in and out the turbine braking mode. The changes of RFVS at the runner inlet dominate the energy transfer among the hydraulic, mechanical and dissipation energies during the transient processes, and therefore affect the stability of hydraulic system.

Main challenges in energy sector nowadays are storing and recovering of a large amount of energy in a short time. Pumped Storage Power Plants (PSP), using reversible pump- turbines are among the most cost-efficient solution to answer these needs. To provide a rapid adjustment to the electrical grid, pump-turbines are subjects of quick switching between pumping and generating modes and to extended operation under off-design conditions. To maintain the stability of the grid, the continuous operating area of reversible pump-turbines must be free of hydraulic instabilities. One of the main sources of pumping mode instabilities is the presence of the rotating stall that occurs at the part load. It can be observed as periodic occurrence and decay of recirculation zones in the distributor regions. Consequently, the machine can be exposed to uncontrollable shift between the operating points with the significant discharge modification and the drop of the efficiency. The phenomenon is very complex, three-dimensional and demanding for the investigation. The paper presents cost- efficient numerical methodology that enables the accurate prediction and analysis of the rotating stall. The investigations were made on a reduced-scaled high head pump-turbine design. Unsteady numerical calculations were performed using code FINE/Turbo^TM and URANS equations. Local flow study was done to describe in details the governing mechanisms of the rotating stall. The analyses enable the investigations of the rotating stall frequencies, the number of stalled cells and the intensity of the rotating stall. Moreover, the unsteady calculations give very good prediction of the pump-turbine performance for both, stable and unstable operating regions. Numerical results show very good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the available experimental data.

Excessive pressure fluctuations in the vaneless space can cause mechanical vibration and even mechanical failures in pump-turbine operation. Mechanism studies on the pressure fluctuations and optimization design of blade geometry to reduce the pressure fluctuations have important significance in industrial production. In the present paper, two pump-turbine runners with big positive and negative blade lean angle were designed by using a multiobjective design strategy. Model test showed that the runner with negative blade lean angle not only had better power performance, but also had lower pressure fluctuation than the runner with positive blade lean angle. In order to figure out the mechanism of pressure fluctuation reduction in the vaneless;jik8space, full passage model for both runners were built and transient CFD computations were conducted to simulate the flow states inside the channel. Detailed flow field analyses indicated that the difference of low-pressure area in the trailing edge of blade pressure side were the main causes of pressure fluctuation reduction in the vaneless space.

Unsteady flow phenomena, including vortex flow at runner inlet, helical backflow in the draft tube and numerous vortexes inside the guide vanes, can occur in pump-turbines under off design conditions at pump mode and can impact normal operation of pump-turbines. All of these phenomena cause serious pressure pulsation, which is quite different from cases in normal pump mode. There is also a difference of pressure pulsation frequency and amplitude in different place through the runner. This paper builds a whole flow passage of a model pump-turbine, simulates flow characteristics in runner by CFD technology, analyses pressure pulsation in the runner and explores the origin and mechanism of pressure pulsations. The SST-CC turbulence model is adopted to perform unsteady simulations of the pump-turbine under 0.46Q_BEP small discharge condition at pump mode. Unsteady flow structures are proceeded combined with hydraulic loss and pressure amplitude spectra. The results indicates that there is complicated disordered flow inside the runner under 0.46Q_BEP small discharge condition at pump mode, shows the amplitude and frequency characteristic of pressure pulsations through runner flow passage.

CFD has entered the product development process in hydraulic machines since more than three decades. Beside the actual design process, in which the most appropriate geometry for a certain task is iteratively sought, several steady-state simulations and related analyses are performed with the help of CFD. Basic transient CFD-analysis is becoming more and more routine for rotor-stator interaction assessment, but in general unsteady CFD is still not standard due to the large computational effort. Especially for FSI simulations, where mesh motion is involved, a considerable amount of computational time is necessary for the mesh handling and deformation as well as the related unsteady flow field resolution. Therefore this kind of CFD computations are still unusual and mostly performed during trouble-shooting analysis rather than in the standard development process, i.e. in order to understand what went wrong instead of preventing failure or even better to increase the available knowledge.

In this paper the application of an efficient and particularly robust algorithm for fast computations with moving mesh is presented for the analysis of transient effects encountered during highly dynamic procedures in the operation of a pump-turbine, like runaway at fixed GV position and load-rejection with GV motion imposed as one-way FSI. In both cases the computations extend through the S-shape of the machine in the turbine-brake and reverse pump domain, showing that such exotic computations can be perform on a more regular base, even if quite time consuming. Beside the presentation of the procedure and global results, some highlights in the encountered flow-physics are also given.

The prediction of characteristics and flow phenomena in reversible pump-turbines becomes increasingly important, since operations under off-design conditions are required to respond to frequency fluctuations within the electrical grid as fast as possible. Fulfilling the requirements of a stable and reliable operation under continuously expanding operating ranges challenges the hydraulic design and requires ambitious developments. Beyond that, precise estimations of occurring flow phenomena combined with a detailed understanding of their causes and mechanisms are essential. This study aims at predicting the S-shaped characteristics of two reversible pump-turbines by using different numerical approaches. Therefore, measurements at a constant wicket-gate opening of Δγ = 10° were done. Based on these experimental data, unsteady flow simulations are performed under steady and transient operating conditions respectively: Starting from the best efficiency point in generating mode, through the runaway, along the S-curve, down to operation in reverse pump mode. The hydraulic machines are spatially discretized in model size with a near-wall refinement of y⁺_mean ≤ 5 and y⁺_mean ≥ 30. The application of two different solvers discloses deviations in underlying methods. The turbulence modeling is basically executed by the k-ω-SST and the standard k- model. Focusing on higher order numerics, the Explicit Algebraic Reynolds Stress Model (EARSM) is selected in the commercial code and extended with an approach for curvature correction (EARSM- CC). In the open-source software, the four-equation v²-f model assumes the role of higher order numerics. The temporal discretization errors are observed using three different time-step sizes. As a supplement, experimental data obtained from the HydroDyna pump-turbine are used as additional validation, providing integral quantities and local pressure distributions at an operating point set on the S-curve. To sum this work up, a methodology is developed to approximate S-shaped characteristics and local effects within the hydraulic machinery properly.

Pumped Storage Plants (PSP) using reversible pump-turbines offer the possibility to store large amounts of energy with high efficiency and at reasonable cost. For reversible high head pump-turbines, the characteristic curves exhibit an S-shape in the turbine, turbine break and reverse pump quadrants. This S-shape leads to unstable behaviour of the turbine when coupling to the grid (for small guide vane opening) or to surge transient phenomena in case of emergency shutdown (for large guide vane opening). Typically the piping system can be exposed to severe pressure oscillations. Furthermore, the flow inside the pump-turbine is characterized by unsteady complex hydrodynamic phenomena. These phenomena have to be deeply investigated to improve the behaviour of the pump-turbine in such operating conditions. This paper focuses on the numerical analysis of the flow in a reversible pump-turbine in the S- shape region. For this application, we used unsteady computation applying the SAS-SST turbulence model and considered a full computational domain that includes all the component of the pump-turbine. The study highlights the evolution of the flow behaviour for a large range of operating conditions: from the optimal efficiency point to the zero discharge condition, for a given constant guide vane opening.