COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LOW HEAD TURBINES ON ENERGY PRODUCTION IN ISOLATED REGIONS OF GANGA RIVER BASIN

Abstract

This research was carried out with the idea to compare and study the low head turbines energy generation capacity in isolated regions of Ganga river basin for the utilization by local residents. With the increase in technological development across multiple zones of society the demand for energy is on a rapid growth. With the introduction of cellular gadgets, electric vehicles and other electricity operated machineries the world is shifting towards a cleaner and greener environment. There still exist a majority of the society which are not urban and live in isolated areas with minimal resources, certain sections have the benefit of Small Scale Hydropower within their surrounding which haven’t been tapped into. With the rise in demand and to decrease the load on central grid these decentralized system could exist to meet with the basic needs of the local isolated areas where transportation of electricity is not feasible neither economical. Multiple turbine exists with efficiency of 40 to 70% for heads as low as 0.3 to 10 m. From this study we found that multiple location could be assessed based on the GIS DEM data of the region having possible heads ranging from 5 to 15 meters in the river basin. ANSYS (FLUENT) was used for initial design study for the flow pattern and its behavior with change in Intake angle, variation in vortex flow in turbine chamber. The result of this study indicated that the designed system and turbine type has 70 -80 % efficiency in the Ganga river basin, with average output power capacity of 100KW.