Narrow Results

Hysteresis effect, which has a significant impact on transient characteristics of a pump-turbine, attracts more and more researchers’ attention and shows great potential. Influences of hysteresis on dynamic characteristics of a pump-turbine are investigated during the transient process in this paper. Transient trajectories of pump-turbines actually do not match their static operation trajectories, especially in the condition of turbine braking. In order to establish a transient model of a pump-turbine in different moving directions of dynamic trajectories, time delays among the relative parameters are introduced in this paper. Furthermore, effects of hysteresis on the dynamic characteristics of the pump-turbine are analyzed in detail by using numerical simulation. Based on the established transient model, influences of unit head on the dynamic characteristics of the pump-turbine are studied during the bidirectional transient process. The simulation results show the transient characteristic of the pump-turbine can be improved with the enhancement of hysteresis effect. While it gradually loses stability with the increase of hysteresis. The conclusions provide us a new approach for regulating the transient performance and stability of pump-turbines by using hysteresis effect during transient process.

The undesirable performance of a positive slope curve usually appears for pump-turbines running as pumps at a low flow rate. The inner flow feature of pump-turbines with 6- and 7-blades runner is studied by both steady and unsteady simulations at pump conditions. According to the steady simulation investigation, obviously back flow vortex is found in the runner passage at the low flow rate zone where the positive slope curve forms. The flow rate at which the instable flow pattern happens of 6-blades runner is smaller than that of 7-blades one. By the unsteady simulation, at the low flow rate zone similar to the steady calculations and the tested data, a rotating stall with four rotating cells can be viewed by significant dynamic post-processing, whose rotation speed is much slower than that of the runner. Therefore, the back flow vortex of steady simulation and rotating stall of unsteady simulation can be used to investigate the runner quality at design stage.