An Updated Model For Gap Leakage In Archimedes Screw Generators

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Simmons, Scott C.
  • Lubitz, William David

• Archimedes screw generators are a small-scale, eco-friendly hydropower technology that are commonly implemented in diversion schemes. The technology has been in use for thousands of years for pumping fluids and granular solids and so its design is largely influenced by Archimedes screw pump manufacturers. There is little engineering design guidance in the literature discussing the optimal design of screw generators, and the existing models used in the literature to suggest the optimal design of screw generators are mostly developed and evaluated with laboratory-scale data. There was a need to evaluate and improve performance prediction models in the literature. This paper outlines a correction to the prediction of gap leakage loss outlined by Lubitz (2014). The correction presented in this paper was found to improve gap leakage predictions by an average of 10.7% when compared to accurate approximations gathered from a CFD simulation.

  Part of Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering International Congress 2022.

• Date created

  2022-06-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • hydropower
  • Archimedes screw generator
  • power loss
  • hydrodynamic screw
  • run-of-river
  • gap leakage
  • leakage loss

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-sbrk-8313

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International