MicroHydro Francis Turbine Part 2

[Music] as spring arrived it was time to complete the finishing tasks on the installation of this francis turbine system last year the project was halted when a snowstorm dropped two feet of snow on the property it made completion of this fully off-grid system all but impossible with the snows melted on the property and continuing to melt off at higher elevations upstream we can see that the creek flow has greatly expanded the design for flood level capacities of the diversion dam has proven its function and the overflow section of the dam easily accommodates this springtime runoff the work that remains to be done are the wiring of the entire system the installation of the electrical equipment that regulate and collect the harnessed power in batteries and the final grooming of the grounds where the dam pen stock and conduits have been installed the francis turbine design is named after james b francis who designed it in 1848 he later went on to become a representative in the massachusetts house of representatives the francis design is utilized in the glen canyon dam which has created lake powell the design is utilized in almost every hydroelectric dam built since 1900 and is responsible for generating almost 20 percent of the world's electricity while there are many environmental impacts of large-scale dams and utility-grade hydroelectricity micro hydro seldom shares those problems how a francis turbine works is by adjusting the amount of water with the use of variable guide vanes the water drives the francis impeller blades and the water exits the turbine down a draft tube the quantity of flow is adjusted with the variable shaft which serves to rotate a ring which is connected to the variable guide vanes these vanes direct more water to the impeller which drives the electric generator via its main shaft as the water exits the turbine the effective measurement of head pressure is based on the level of water in the exit channel to feed the wire through the buried conduit first a lead line with a plastic bag is fed into the conduit and pulled with a vacuum to the other end this lead line is then used to pull what is called a mule tape back through the conduit once this mule tape is in place the wire can be attached and pulled either by hand or utilizing an electric tug or hauled from a tie up to a truck the process was complicated by snags in the conduit which had to be identified where they were consequently unburied and repaired before the job could be completed the folks finishing the burial at the end of last year's work did not take adequate precautions in the bedding and the conduit was damaged as you can see it is a strong lesson in the proper bedding of both the conduit and pen stock this can easily occur when the soil is filled with heavy rocks as would be typical in a stream bed region once the wire had finally been pulled in 500 foot sections they were later joined with unions in ground access boxes the unions were wrapped and sealed with heat shrink material with the number two gauge aluminum wire being joined to the color-coded copper wire at the house there are different electric wiring color codes between the us and china so with this unit being manufactured in china that must be taken into account when wiring the system at the turbine the intricate complexity of how this system's electrics function has tested my own basic knowledge of power management let's have ken gardner describe how the system functions yes the six kilowatt hydro turbine francis turbine located down the river here wild tree phase three phases come into this disconnect fuse disconnect and it comes in at about 70 hertz and it can range from 70 down to about 50 hertz it's unregulated comes into this disconnect from here it travels over to uh jim long rectifier dump load controller this is rated at 10 kilowatts ac power comes here and is rectified to dc power at 240 volts dc approximately from here it comes into this inverter that takes the dc power turns it back into regulated 60 hertz ac power from here it comes back over into this eight kilowatt outback power radian inverter and so the power from the grid tie inverter goes into the ac outputs of this inverter this is a battery based inverter and this is the battery bank this is a three sets of 204 amp hour capacity agm batteries absorb glass batteries so combined total is the 612 amp hours capacity batteries and so this then provides ac power to the main service panel right here so the main service panel for this home is in the basement so power from this panel goes back around the home into some conduit we placed earlier this is known as the mate 3s from outback power this is the brain center of the system right here it has a dollar sign it's right now it says zero this would show how much power is coming into the hydro turbine and then the line below it is how much is being used in the system right now there is 0.2 kilowatts of power on in the home which is lights a refrigerator upstairs this also gives the upper right hand corner of the battery voltage 50.8 50.4 volts right now but that's just a good device to monitor what is going on with the system and that's how the system works there are a few details which i would like to point out which weren't covered in part one about this system a fused disconnect has been installed at the turbine site additionally the blue wire pictured here is buried the entire length of the pen stock and can be used to precisely locate the pipeline and its depth in the future locks have been installed on the valves at both ends of the pen stock to prevent any errant tampering and there is a rubber coupling which isolates any vibrations in the turbine from the penstock itself because the land is historically a creek bed the soils have a great deal of rocks embedded and smoothed by the meandering course of the water over millennia the burial of a penstock an electric conduit uncovers these stones and dressing the trench with an excavator before reseeding the pasture will over time heal and hide the disturbance to the meadow with the dressing of the ground nearly completed and the pen stock full with water it is time to start the francis turbine this regulated startup is to set the output capacity at the appropriate level [Music] [Applause] i've received no benefit from this video other than being granted full access to the professional expertise of ken gardner and his crew i believe that anyone looking to install a micro hydro system would save themselves a great deal of errors and unnecessary costs by engaging a professional for guidance or instruction many pitfalls can be avoided by accessing the breadth of knowledge and experience designer or installer can provide so with the completion of this project i will be looking to locate and document other micro hydro systems to add to this channel and thereby spread the knowledge and interest in decentralized small-scale power generation i again wish to thank the system designer ken gardner and his crew for their generosity and thanks for watching and learning about micro hydro

Channel: MrHydrohead

Views: 572,760

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Id: 8oE7hULefA4

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022