12/26/23, 1:10 PM Design of a Francis Turbine Stage

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Design of a Francis Turbine Stage

By Geet Nautiyal
3D INVERSE DESIGN FRANCIS TURBINES September 27, 2023

Francis turbines play a major role in existing hydropower generation systems. Increasingly,
they are also becoming an important area of development for energy storage, which is a
key aspect of the process of decarbonisation. This is because further growth of renewable
energy (wind/solar) in the grid depends on cost-effective and large-scale energy storage
systems, for which Francis turbines are now increasingly considered as an option in the
form of pump-turbine systems.

Over the years, ADT has helped many major customers streamline and speed up the
design and optimization of Francis turbine stages, and has developed considerable fluid
dynamic knowledge to design high-performance Francis turbines in the process

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systematically. Here is a summary of some of the main adverse fluid phenomena that
cause drops in performance in Francis turbine stages.

Hydraulic Turbine Design Process

The first step in the design of any hydraulic turbine is to identify the required specific
speed regime of the turbine. This will dictate the meridional shape and hence the general
flow direction through the machine. For example, a low specific speed hydraulic turbine is
likely to be a Pelton or Francis type, whereas a high specific speed one is likely to be of
Kaplan or Bulb type.

From the required specific speed, we can identify the main flow phenomena and loss
mechanisms dominant in that particular range (Figure 1). For example, leakage and
secondary flow effects are more dominant in lower ranges, whereas profile losses take
priority in the medium and higher ranges. It must be noted that a phenomenon such as
cavitation can affect hydraulic turbines over the entire specific speed range and must be
dealt with on a case basis.

From the information above we can use design tools and 3D CFD to investigate our turbine
designs, what follows are a set of principal design guidelines based on the fluid dynamics
considerations of reducing dominant flow losses for a given runner / vane.

Meanline Design of Francis Turbine Stage

Figure 1 contains the stage specifications, consisting of a volute, stay vanes, guide vanes,
runner and a draft tube. From these specs, we can see that it is positioned very close to the
Francis turbine band. This means that using these specs, designing a Francis turbine stage
with a high-efficiency level should be possible.

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Figure 1: Francis turbine stage specifications and its position on the specific speed chart

Using the meanline code TURBOdesign Pre, it is very easy to enter the given specs, and
then it quickly generates the meridional shape of the Francis turbine stage in less than a
second. As Figure 2 shows, it also provides a detailed report including the estimated stage
performance and some important dimensions, as well as the required rVt* for the stay
vane, guide vane and runner. These rVt* values for the different components are
equivalent to their work coefficients, and they will be used for the 3D inverse design of the
vanes and the runner in the next section.

Figure 2: Meanline design of Francis turbine stage in TURBOdesign Pre

3D Blade Design of Stay/Guide Vanes and Runner

Figure 3 presents the setup for the baseline Francis turbine stage in our 3D inverse design
software TURBOdesign1, and these axial chord distributions for the stay vane, guide vane
and runner, they all come from the meanline code as we saw earlier. The spanwise work
distribution for each component is a free vortex, so it has a constant value from hub to

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shroud. It is worth noting that the rVt* of the downstream leading edge is kept the same as
the upstream trailing edge for all the components, ensuring a good match between them.
The loading distribution is foreloaded for the stay vane, mid-loaded for the guide vane and
for this baseline runner, it is fore-loaded at both hub and shroud. These inputs result in 3D
geometries of the different components in their correct locations as shown alongside.

Figure 3: 3D blade design of stay/guide vanes and runner in TURBOdesign1

Volute Design

The meanline code TURBOdesign Pre also generates a volute report, and TURBOdesign
Volute uses this information to design the volute for the Francis turbine as shown in Figure
4.

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Figure 4: Volute design using TURBOdesign Volute

Draft Tube Design

Since TURBOdesign Pre also includes a draft tube in the meanline computations, this was
designed as well. For this, some information from the meanline report and some from the
literature was used to get the correct dimensions as shown in Figure 5. Using this, a conical
diffuser draft tube was obtained with an acceptable cone half-angle of 5 degrees, of which
a 90-degree sector was included in CFD calculations.

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Figure 5: Draft tube design

Baseline Stage – CFD Setup

Once all the Francis turbine stage components were ready, a CFD analysis was run on the
baseline stage to check the performance. The boundary conditions used in CFD were
chosen to match the inlet conditions and mass flow rate from the TD1 case. Figure 6 shows
that ANSYS TurboGrid was used for the fully structured grids of the runner and the vanes,
ANSYS Mesh for the hybrid mesh of the volute and the draft tube, and CFX for the flow
analysis.

Figure 6: Baseline Francis turbine stage CFD setup

Baseline Stage – Results

Figure 7 has the results for the baseline stage, where the TURBOdesign1 performance
parameters show the profile loss and secondary flow indicators as well as the throat area
value. Interestingly, the surface static pressure distribution from the inverse design shows
a very negative minimum pressure, especially at the suction surface's front portion. This
could mean a very strong possibility of cavitation in this region of the turbine.

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Figure 7: Baseline Francis turbine stage results

Also presented are the CFD results where both the total-to-total and total-to-static
efficiency levels are very close to the meanline code estimation. Also, the flow rate is very
close to the design value, meaning that the throat is not far from the correct size. However,
CFD plots also show a negative minimum pressure in the same area further confirming the
possibility of cavitation that was predicted by the inverse design.

In another article, we demonstrate the use of the Optima feature in TURBOdesign1 to

automatically optimize the baseline runner and enhance its performance by improving
efficiency and removing the possibility of cavitation at the same time.

OPTIMIZE THE BASELINE RUNNER

Book a LIVE demo on the design of a turbomachinery

application of your choice.
Our demo is tailored to your specific application and design challenges

BOOK A DEMONSTRATION

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Geet Nautiyal
Geet Nautiyal is a Turbomachinery Application Engineer at Advanced Design Technology,
focusing on design, marketing and customer support aspects.

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