Experimental Study on the Effect of Flow rate on the Performance of Two-Blade Archimedes Screw Turbine

Abstract

The double blade Archimedes screw turbine has been developed in recent years in countries that have river flow potential, because it is capable of working under conditions of low flow and heads smaller than 10 meters. In order to obtain information in determining the turbine design that has good performance, the research aims to investigate the performance of Archimedes screw turbines because of the effect of flow rates on torque, power and efficiency. The screw turbine model is a two-blade, made of stainless steel with 2Ro pitch, the inner radius of 0.077 m, the outer radius of 0.1435 m and a length of 2 m. The measured and observed variables are turbine rotation, torque, and flow discharge. Tests were conducted on three variations of flow discharge are 0.025 m3/s, 0.0125 m3/s, and 0.0044 m3/s. According to the test results, the highest rotation and turbine power occur at 0.025 m3/s flow rate are 295 rpm and 116.10 Watt and maximum turbine efficiency is 55% at 0.0125 m3/s. The results of this study indicate that to obtain maximum torque and power, flow conditions must be maintained at the highest water flow rate conditions, even though the efficiency obtained is not the maximum value.