Abstract

In this work, the commissioning of a 10 kW power micro-hydraulic plant has been carried out, with the purpose of carrying out an experimental work to analyze the effect of the variation of the operating conditions on the performance of a Pelton Turbine. Although the characterization of the Pelton turbine has been carried out using different injector diameters, water flow rates, with different braking powers of the shaft, it has not been characterized for different pressure heights, but only the variations of these due to the effect of the flow rate variation and injector diameters, considering power generated in the turbine shaft of 70 (W) (Rafae Alomar et al., 2022a). In this work, an experimental characterization of a turbine is carried out considering different injector openings d, pressure heights H and water flow rate Q. In addition, different electrical consumptions are applied P elect connected to the generator to obtain the performance of the Pelton turbine. The experimental results show that the increase in the injector opening leads to a reduction in the input power due to the decrease in the pressure head (H) (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2012). There is an optimal performance of the turbine influenced by the electrical consumption applied to the electrical generator, given the increase in torque and pressure to supply the necessary power. It is also observed that when considering the speed of the constant turbine-generator shaft for each test, it is obtained that the torque and power in the shaft are increasing, both by increasing the electrical consumption applied to the electrical generator and by increasing the shaft rotation speed. On the other hand, an increase in performance is observed when the rotation speed increases and the electrical consumption applied to the electrical generator decreases. The best hydraulic performance of the turbine was 71% and it is achieved for conditions with a shaft rotation speed of 630 rpm, applying an electrical consumption of 3 kW to the electrical generator.