An experimental and numerical investigation into using hydropower plant on oil transmission lines

Abstract

Replacing control valves in the inlet lines of oil transmission stations with hydropower plants can be a logical solution to convert energy losses into useful power. In this regard, this paper carried out an experimental and numerical investigation to study the feasibility of applying a pump as turbine in a hydropower system and its performance on the oil transmission lines. An experimental platform, comprising a tank, hydropower, centrifugal pump, electromotor, and measuring instruments, was constructed. An external gear pump was employed regarding the high working pressure of the system, maximally 80 bar, as an actuator of the centrifugal pump. By comparing the efficiency of the electropump with the hydropower-driven pump, it was observed that maximum efficiency, approximately 20.6%, occurred when the pump reached its best efficiency point. Furthermore, based on experiments on hydropower-driven pump under different inlet pressures, an optimal point was observed for the system. This issue enhanced the system's efficiency by 19% as the flow rate increased by 1.9 L/s in the inlet pressure of 80 bar. According to the results, as the flow rate increases, there is a descending trend in outlet pressure. Besides this, there is an optimum condition for the maximum efficiency of hydropower plants and this crucial point should be determined by experimental or numerical studies to reach maximum performance. Furthermore, extracted values of power from the computational fluid dynamics model were compared with the experiments with less than 8% error in most cases. Therefore, a correlation was introduced for the prediction of power based on effective parameters of outlet pressure and volumetric flow rate for the off-design condition in each inlet pressure with roughly 2% error.

The Suppression of Hump Instability inside a Pump Turbine in Pump Mode Using Water Injection Control

“…Three sets of structured grids were generated via ANSYS ICEM to verify that the grid densities can reasonably predict the external characteristics of pump turbine within a certain error range. The head coefficient defined by Equation (1) under designed conditions was selected for verification, and its relative error was obtained according to Equation (2).…”

“…Pumped storage energy is widely considered to be one of the most mature, economical, and large-scale, green, low-carbon, flexible adjustment technologies in power systems [1]. In addition, pump-as-turbine (PAT) technology holds significant promise for the advancement of small-scale hydroelectric power systems, particularly in regions lacking access to largescale power plants [2].…”

Low-Carbon Economic Dispatch of Electricity and Cooling Energy System

“…The electric-thermal deep integration involves two typical scenarios, namely the electricheating combined supply and the electric-cooling combined supply [4][5][6]. Fully tapping into the thermal characteristics of heating/cooling systems and buildings, and utilizing the flexibility space contained in user thermal comfort elasticity, is a deep mechanism problem for achieving renewable energy consumption under the electric-thermal integration [7][8][9].…”

Effect of Vibration Direction on Two-Dimensional Ultrasonic Assisted Grinding-Electrolysis-Discharge Generating Machining Mechanism of SiCp/Al

“…Aluminum-based silicon carbide composite materials are increasingly used in the field of turbine part material preparation due to their various advantages, such as high hardness, low weight, and wear resistance [ 1 , 2 ]. Traditional grinding, milling, and other mechanical processing technologies cannot be processed efficiently and with high quality; however, ultrasonic-assisted processing technology, which is similar to “micro-grinding”, performs remarkably well on hard, brittle, and difficult-to-machine materials and can generate better workpiece surface quality while utilizing lower grinding force [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ].…”