Turgo Turbine

Description

This project simulates a Turgo turbine using ANSYS Fluent, with water flowing at a velocity of 4 m/s as it passes through the turbine. A Turgo turbine is a type of impulse water turbine — highly efficient and compact, which makes it well suited to many hydroelectric applications, particularly under high-head conditions.

The Turgo turbine is distinguished by its unique design and operating principle. Unlike many other turbines, it uses the kinetic energy of a water jet directed onto its blades to generate rotational motion, which is then converted into electrical energy — a process central to the operation of hydroelectric power plants.

The blades were drawn in SOLIDWORKS at a specific angle and distance from the central axis and then imported into Design Modeler for the integrated blade design. Around the turbine blades, a dedicated cylindrical region is created to represent the circulating water flow, while a rectangular cuboid domain is designed to serve as the space for the free water flow. Meshing was performed in ANSYS Meshing using an unstructured grid; to improve accuracy, the Tetrahedrons method was used, giving an element count of 4,344,106.

Methodology

The Mesh Motion (Sliding Mesh) technique is used to simulate the rotation of the turbine blades. Accordingly, the cylindrical region is assigned a mesh-motion condition with a rotational speed of 150 rpm about the central horizontal axis of the turbine. Because the sliding-mesh approach physically rotates the mesh in time, it captures the true transient interaction between the moving blades and the incoming water jet.

The realizable k-epsilon model is selected to represent the turbulence of the flow, and the effect of gravity is included in the Z direction at −9.81 m/s².

Conclusion

On completion of the solution, two- and three-dimensional results for pressure, velocity, and velocity vectors were obtained. As expected, the maximum velocity occurs in the immediate vicinity of the rotating blades. A full set of performance quantities can be extracted from the simulation, including a pressure drop of approximately 4.979 × 10⁴ Pa across the turbine.

Overall, the study demonstrates how the water jet strikes the Turgo blades and drives their rotation, and how the Mesh Motion (Sliding Mesh) technique reproduces this moving-blade behavior to reveal the turbine's hydrodynamic performance.