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I have a project in which I am designing a lightweight, portable hydropower system, and I'm unsure of how exactly I am to choose the correct style of turbine. For context, the turbine is only really going to be used in a 'Run-of River' style, in areas with a flow rate between 1.0 m/s and 4.0 m/s. It's something I haven't really worked on before, so any advice would be much appreciated.

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Speed is not the only concern.

You need to consider the mass flow rate, but I don't think you have the flow rate of the hydro scheme local to me: 75m^3 per second through 3 Pelton turbines with a head of 1883 metres.

You need to work out whether a Pelton, Francis or Kaplan turbine will work for your situation.

From a small scale setup we generated 3.5kW with a flow rate of 20 litres/sec and some 30 metres head.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the advice, although this is a bit of an ambitious project, i am trying to see what kind of power I can generate with a head of max 1 metre in an area with flow rate roughly 45kg/s. Having been given the constraints of lightweight and portable, I've been pushed towards designing a turbine which is only about 15cm in diameter. $\endgroup$
    – Eoi McTaggart
    Commented Jan 17 at 15:53
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Low-head turbines are of the kaplan type and require a pressure head of at least 20 feet to be economical for use in generating hydroelectricity. Below that, you are talking about undershot water wheels and the like which lose efficiency as they get scaled down.

Remember that the flow horsepower contained in a moving fluid is the pressure head times the mass flow rate times the conversion factor. If you had 100% efficiency, this number sets the maximum possible power recovery.

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  • $\begingroup$ We had a Kaplan as part of our lab, head was 1.5 metres... and efficiency was pretty good - part of the reason we had it really, had to be compared to other axial and a Pelton. $\endgroup$
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Jun 15 at 6:49
  • $\begingroup$ @SolarMike, will edit. -NN $\endgroup$
    – niels nielsen
    Commented Jun 15 at 16:15
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Virtually Any turbine can work on small scale. With a Pinch configuration, the rate of flow doesn't matter because the pressure can be exerted. enter image description here

But the broadest diameter or lowest pressure "Cross-Flow" turbine is an excellent choice enter image description here

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