Turbines of hydropower plants suffer from a gradual damage caused by the impact of small sediments, which are contained in stream waters. This gradual damage leads to a change of shape of the turbine buckets so that the efficiency of the machine can be found to decrease rapidly. Costly (...)
Gravels and stones found in streams can become a severe nuisance to the operation of a hydropower plant. In the case of a Pelton turbine, the momentum of stones impacting one or many of its buckets can cause them to crack or break, which indeniably leads to the immediate cease of operations of (...)
The present doctoral work is related to the erosion arising from repeated impacts of high speed water droplets on specific parts of Pelton turbines. Indeed for high head Pelton units, the jet of water is composed of a liquid core surrounded by droplets.
Observations show that regions of impact (...)
Cavitation is the process of developing vapor bubbles in a liquid flow by decreasing in pressure at almost constant temperature. Erosion by cavitation appears in flow regions where unsteady cavitation pockets exist.
It is well known that cavitation can have detrimental consequences in rotating (...)