How the Turbines in the Kölnbrein Dam are 92% Efficient | Richard Hammond’s Big

[Music] so the water rolls in through each of these six nozzles deflectors in front aim it into the right place to hit the buckets set this wheel spinning 500 rpm sets the shaft spinning and from there they create electricity responsibility for keeping the turbine in tip-top condition lies with walter staudaka and for today only me this is where it all comes together and at this point it suddenly becomes about absolute precision the precise design and shape of these buckets enables them to harness as much as 92 of the energy from the water talk to me about the splitter the bit in the middle how many just the splitter in the middle there the the chat the water jet is cutting into two pieces you know like a knife at home it had to be sharp otherwise you need a lot of force so i've got to sharpen the splitter yes i've never said that before here that's now running that's the right put on your eyes and then you start grinding up here here oh my god this is right at the heart of the machine all the effort we've seen so far hangs on what happens there [Music] there is a very good reason why the buckets on this turbine wheel are this shape if you had a single scoop the water would come in here hit it turn the wheel that's good but then some of it would splash back and hit the bucket behind that's inefficient this is about controlling how the water gets out as well as how it gets in with the splitter in place water comes in hits it pushes the wheel but then it's sort of scooped straight out into even streams it's efficient that's how they get to 92 efficiency here the reason this has to be sharp and why i've just been sharpening it i can demonstrate with this here's my bucket my scoop here is the splitter nice and sharp and here comes my flow of water fresh from the dam and as it hits the splitter is dividing it between the two sides of the bucket and that's not bad i've lost some ping pong balls but they've ended up pretty much evenly distributed between the two sides maybe we've got 92 efficiency there right we can reset and demonstrate how it would work with a less sharpened splitter right so all i'm doing is turning this over it's got a blunt edge it hasn't been sharpened same process switch on water coming all the way from our dam hitting the bucket at the very end and it's a disaster every ping pong ball flying away is more water not being used to push the turbine wheel you won't stand a chance of hitting 92 odd percent efficiency and now we've got to tidy up their turbine hole sorry above the turbine where the water hits the buckets is the generator which creates the electricity and they're connected by a massive 25 ton metal shaft wow i'm sitting directly above that turbine beneath me it's turning as the water pushes it round this is the output shaft and that means the turbine has done a very clever thing it's turned linear motion of the water moving along into rotary circular motion in the old days that'll be a water wheel give you this to grind corn or even sharpened knives here they're using it to make electricity and how they do that is pretty simple this is in miniature what's happening here it's a bicycle dynamo light and if i persuade it to come apart you'll see that when your bicycle wheel turns this sharp on the end this shaft on the end of it is a magnet magnet's a funny thing move a magnet around a conductive metal like copper and it moves tiny particles inside it electrons and moving electrons that is electricity and so if i reassemble my little dynamo here i'm going to see if i can use a bit of their power to make my own of stealing their power so that is water from the dam turning that gigantic turbine to turn both the enormous generator above and my tiny bicycle one here and light this light i mean it would be a lot of trouble to go for if that's all it did it's on a bigger scale than this and so we come to the final part of the process getting the freshly made electricity to homes all over europe and this is the control room which makes that happen everything we've seen so far every drop of water and of sweat if you like ends up here this is the place where big just got bigger the columbine dam we've been looking at is there on this that charts the whole network and as you can see it's just one remote corner in it that's how big this network is and the water flows along the pipes as we've seen to the turbines these are the ones here one of which i've just been in and ultimately the end product is they call it from water to wire because it goes from water as we've seen gathered behind dams like the comprise along the pipes down to the turbines and then it leaves here on the wire and there is the words and it's gone turned into power the current generated here passes through these transformers into those wires and from there is distributed some of it into the local grid some of it over the alps and beyond salzburg vienna and even further and incredibly whether for some reason to be a national blackout in austria this site here has the capacity to restart the entire national grid did say water was powerful stuff the columbrine dam is the mother of all batteries it doesn't just hold back 200 million tons of water it harnesses it transforming its raw energy into the electricity that powers a nation this dam does big things but it does them with a sort of grace and elegance this beautiful shape people travel just to look at it as it moves and breeds and works with the water and with the landscape and the team of people beneath my feet right now tending to its every move they too are part of the same vast machine that could still be here hundreds of years from now generating clean power to make people's lives better that really is big you

Channel: Discovery Australia

Views: 2,979,464

Keywords: discovery australia, discovery aus, australian videos, australian youtube videos, discovery australia youtube, richard hammond, Richard Hammond’s Big, How The Turbines In The Kölnbrein Dam Are 92% Efficient, Kölnbrein Dam, austria, Kolmbrein Dam Austria, Richard Hammond explains, Richard Hammond austria, richard hammond engineering, richard hammond turbine, richard hammond big, richard hammond tv, richard hammond science, richard hammond explainer, rhmm

Id: DbvgK3PrSWw

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020