Performance analysis of Pelton turbine under different operating conditions: An experimental study

In this article, an experimental work has been carried out to examine the effect of varying operating conditions on performance of Pelton turbine. The experiments have been performed for various nozzle jet diameters (d), volume flowrate (Q) and pressure head (H). The experimental results display that the rise in d leads to reduce the input power due to decrease in H. For a certain nozzle diameter, the results indicated that the maximum brake power increases with increasing in Q owing to increase the torque and consequently, the optimum operational condition can be achieved when using smaller d and higher Q. The best turbine performance has been found when using d = 9.5 mm and Q = 85 L/min owing to produce higher efficiency and cover large range of wheel speed. The maximum efficiency of nozzle diameters 9.5 mm, 10.5 mm, 11.5 mm and 12.5 mm have been found equal 35.5%, 33%, 29.2% and 21.6%, respectively. Hence, d has inversely effect on the turbine performance. The data clearly also indicate that d and Q have substantially influences on the power that generated by turbine. By recognizing the effects of related parameters, it is now possible to generate a higher electric power in hydroelectric power plants that operated by using Pelton turbine. (C) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University