Study of silt erosion on performance of a Pelton turbine

The erosion of turbine components causes the decrease in turbine efficiency; increase in the maintenance cost and down time for turbine repair. All these factors contribute to the plant cost and cause the revenue losses. It is, therefore, essential to study the amount of efficiency loss owing to the erosion of turbine components due to the silt particles coming in water. The present study has been carried out to investigate the effect of silt erosion for different silt laden parameters and operating parameters such as silt concentration, size of silt particles, jet velocity and operating hours of the turbine on efficiency loss in Pelton turbine buckets. It has been found that turbine efficiency loss depends strongly on silt and operating parameters. A correlation has also been developed as a function of silt parameters and operating condition for percentage of efficiency loss. The developed correlation may be useful for turbine manufactures in order to predict the efficiency loss of a Pelton turbine at the manufacturing stage of a turbine under a given silt content water for a particular site. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.