Identification of Francis Turbine Helical Vortex Rope Excitation by CFD and Resonance Simulation With the Hydraulic System

Due to the growing development of new renewable energies, which production is difficult to foreseen, power grid is subjected to disturbances. Hydropower plants are one of the solution to restore the grid stability by allowing hydraulic machines, especially Francis turbines, to change quickly of operating points in a very large range of heads and power in order to cover the variation of the electrical demand. In part load conditions, the cavitating vortex rope is an excitation source for the whole hydraulic circuit. The frequency of the excitation may matches with one of the eigenfrequency of the system leading to resonance phenomena. The aim of this paper is to simulate this hydroacoustic resonance by identifying the excitation source with CFD numerical simulations of the cavitating vortex rope and simulating the response of the hydraulic system with a one dimensional compressible model. A one dimensional draft tube model including three key parameters is used: the excitation momentum source corresponding to the force induced by the vortex rope acting on the wall, the excitation mass source induced by the cavitation volume fluctuations and the thermodynamic damping modeling energy dissipation during the phase change between cavitation and liquid. These parameters are computed for the FLINDT reduced scale model with the help of unsteady CFD simulations considering both one phase and two phase simulations. Finally these parameters are injected in the one dimensional hydroacoustic model to simulate the resonance phenomenon. In out of resonance conditions, maximum of pressure fluctuations are found in the draft tube cone with an amplitude of 1% of the turbine head. However, when resonance occurs, maximum amplitude of pressure fluctuations reaches up to 6.8%.