Innovative Technologies Being Developed for Hydropower at Warwick University
Water-power is the only renewable energy that can be generated reliably at industrial scale to meet increasing demands for clean energy resources.However,key issues such as cavitation and associated hydraulic instabilities and silt erosion etc are the most challenging problems preventing us from effective use of hydropower in particular for extremely large schemes.The concert action of cavitation and silt-erosion will make erosion much worse.Unfortunately it is often the cases but we have no satisfactory solutions yet.For example,the most·advanced and world largest turbines supplied to the Three Gorge Project by the world leading manufacturers (two consortiums:Alstom+HEC,GE+Voith Siemens+DFEM) have all developed a very strange pattern of damages soon after commissioning.The studies by the author show that these are not isolated technical issue; it is a fundamental issue reflecting on huge turbines like those employed by the Three Gorges project about the validity of the similarity laws by which modern turbines are being developed and tested.From theoretical viewpoint,it is a combination of two challenging fluid subjects,namely the boundary-layer turbulence and the inception of cavitation.The timely investigation of this fundamental problem will not only make invaluable contributions to huge turbine and other hydraulic machine developments but also significant impact to fundamental science.In response to these world-class challenges to turbine industry,fundamental research is being performed in the cavitation laboratory at the University of Warwick,UK.A few on-going programs are briefly introduced here.
S.C.Li
Cavitation Research Group, Warwick University Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
国内会议
北京
英文
21-38
2009-04-20（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）