dc.description.abstract
The project concerns the hydropower renewable energy technology at its micro scale:
thanks to an internship performed with the Belgian startup TurbulentHydro, the purpose
of this Master Thesis is to evaluate the energy performance of 2 di erent models currently
under investigation: the so-called Flatblades and Streamlines con gurations. These
layouts are similar in shape but di erent both in dimension and for the turbine used.
After a little introduction on renewable energies and hydropower technology, the
selected CFD simulation procedure and all its options have been explained as well as the
choice of the turbulence model to apply, computing the meaningful parameters to add in
the model. This dissertation highlights the
uid dynamics behaviour by means of suitable
softwares for this purpose: Autodesk Inventor, the 3D CAD mechanical design software
in order to build, and edit when necessary, the geometries of the models considered,
MeshMixer, a state-of-art software for locally adjusting the mesh of the starting model
and OpenFOAM, a free and open source CFD program in order to run and evaluate any
details of the analysis, simulating the operation conditions by means of its components
and tools. Eventually, the most important CFD results are presented.
Di erent con gurations bring di erent results. Regarding Flatblades model, the scope
was re ned the CFD initial setup in order to achieve results as close to the real case
validation as possible whereas, for Streamlines model, an additional new component has
been added for improving the current design in terms of energy output at the turbine
level. At the end, conclusions stated possible re nements and improvements for these
simulations as well as uncertainties arose from the results that might be avoided for the
next stages.
