STUDY ON THE PERFORMANCE OF MICRO HYDRO TURBINE GENERATOR CONVERTED FROM ELECTRIC POWERED PUMP

Abstract

Hydropower is a renewable source of energy. It has little fluctuation which is different from solar and wind power. The cost of large scale hydroelectricity is generally very low. Adding to large scale, development of small and micro scale hydropower is very efficient in developing countries. However currently small and micro hydro turbine are not mass-produced and are generally expensive. For the purpose of realizing the low cost micro hydropower, the authors modified a low cost electric powered pumping with 750W of rated electric power and converted it to a micro hydro turbine generator. In order to convert the pump to the hydro turbine, the inlet and outlet of water were reversed. In order to convert the induction motor to grid independent type induction generator, capacitors with appropriate capacitance for the excitation were connected to the electric circuit. In this study, the authors carried out the performance tests of the hydro turbine by using pressure gauges, a flow meter, a torque meter and a revolution sensor as measuring devices. Also, we measured the output of the hydro turbine generator by using a power analyzer. As a result, 733.9 W of maximum output power could be obtained by the hydro turbine by 1138.2 W of input water power. (i.e., 16.6 m of head and 7.0 liter/s of flow rate) At this time, 540.8 W of maximum electric power could be obtained by the hydro turbine generator. The authors think the application of this type of micro hydro turbine generator would be very useful in developing countries, like Kenya.