What's inside?
The increasing use of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions necessitates additional green technologies to stabilize the grid due to their intermittent nature.
Pumped hydro storage (PHS) systems are a reliable solution for this purpose. Traditional hydro power systems typically require high head, limiting potential installation sites. A low head PHS system is ideal for flat geographies lacking high head reservoirs.
ALPHEUS, the European Union's Horizon 2020 project aims to implement a low head seawater PHS system for enhancing grid stability. A contra-rotating reversible pump turbine is designed using an inverse 3D blade design approach to meet the project's requirements.
Computational fluid dynamic analysis is conducted in both pump and turbine modes to evaluate performance under various conditions. Optimization through a Design of Experiments approach is used to maximize performance at the model scale. A laboratory model test will validate the optimized design's performance.
In this publication, you will:
- See how a shaft-driven contra-rotating reversible pump-turbine is designed and tested to demonstrate its potential for this application.
- Discover how the design is further optimized with the help of a DoE based optimization technique and very high efficiency levels are achieved and verified by tests.
- Learn how the design and operation optimization of the whole system implementing operation simulation models could minimize investment costs.
