Numerical and experimental studies of three-dimensional flow fields in hydraulic turbine runners

The numerical simulations of hydraulic turbine runners such as Francis and Kaplan runners have widely been carried out by using three-dimensional Euler code with the pseudo-compressibility. However, there are rare cases that include the verifications of the simulation accuracy based on the experimental data. In this paper, the developed three-dimensional Euler code is applied for the flow simulations in runners of Francis and Kaplan turbines, and also the pressure distributions on runner blades and the flow velocities around runners are measured by the homologous models under several operating conditions. It is finally demonstrated that the computational results are in good agreement with the experimental ones by comparing both results.