As part of the Swedish Center for Sustainable Hydropower (SVC) and the ALPHEUS Horizon 2020 EU project, we are focusing on the details of the flow in water turbines and pump turbines and the cooling flow in electric generators.
We contribute to open source development through the OpenFOAM Turbomachinery Special Interest Group.
We have been doing research on fluid dynamics in hydropower applications since 1997. Initially developing an in-house CFD code for parallel simulations of flow in water turbines, we switched to the OpenFOAM open source CFD tool in 2005. Since then we have been actively involved in the development and validation of OpenFOAM for hydropower applications. The developments have made it possible to do highly resolved simulations of turbulent flow in rotating machinery, including rotor-stator interaction and changes of blade angles during transient operation.
Some main areas of research have been:
- Numerical methods and turbulence modelling for CFD in hydropower applications.
- Fundamental investigations of laminar and turbulent swirling flows and vortex breakdown.
- Studies of flow features in water turbines.
- Investigations of cavitation in water turbines.
- Flow features during transient operation of water turbines.
- Low-head pump turbines.
- Hydropower generator cooling air flow.
- Machine learning for hydropower applications.
Publications
Most publications by group members can be found in this list.
Doctoral theses
- Flow over rough surfaces, and conjugate heat transfer, in engineering applications. Bercelay Niebles Atencio, 2018 (Opens in new tab)
- Ventilation Flow Field Characteristics of a Hydro-Generator Model- An experimental and Numerical Study. Hamed Jamshidi, 2017 (Opens in new tab)
- Turbulence-resolving Simulations of Swirling Flows. Ardalan Javadi, 2016 (Opens in new tab)
- Simulations of cavitation - from the large vapour structures to the small bubble dynamics. Aurelia Vallier, 2013. (Collaboration with Lund University). (Opens in new tab)
- Prediction of Cooling Air Flow in Electric Generators. Pirooz Moradnia, 2013 (Opens in new tab)
- Towards Full Predictions of the Unsteady Incompressible Flow in Rotating Machines, Using OpenFOAM. Olivier Petit, 2012 (Opens in new tab)
- Analytical and Numerical Studies of Internal Swirling Flows. Walter Gyllenram, 2008 (Opens in new tab)
- Numerical Investigations of Turbulent Flow in Water Turbines. Håkan Nilsson, 2002 (Opens in new tab)
Recordings by group members
Håkan Nilsson:
- Studies of transient operation of hydraulic machines using OpenFOAM (27 min)
(Keynote lecture at 1st UK-India OpenFOAM Symposium, 2024) - Rotating Machinery Training at 16t OpenFOAM Workshop (1 h 45 min)
Saeed Salehi:
- OpenFOAM for Francis turbine transients (5 min)
(Presentation of paper in OpenFOAM Journal) - A parallel TensorFlow-based deep reinforcement learning framework for OpenFOAM (20 min)
(Presentation at 18th OpenFOAM workshop in Genoa, 2023) - Evolution of flow features during transient operation of a Kaplan turbine, (21 min)
(Presentation at 17th OpenFOAM workshop at Cambridge, 2022) - Simulation of Kaplan turbine transients: a novel OpenFOAM framework (13 min)
(Presentation at 16th OpenFOAM workshop, on-line, organized “in” Dublin, 2021)
Jonathan Fahlbeck:
- A head loss pressure boundary condition for hydraulic systems (5 min)
(Presentation of paper in OpenFOAM Journal) - Cavitation simulations of a low head contra-rotating pump-turbine (16 min)
(Presentation at 18th OpenFOAM workshop in Genoa, 2023) - A low-head contra-rotating pump-turbine at unsteady conditions (17 min)
(Presentation at 17th OpenFOAM workshop at Cambridge, 2022) - Numercial simulations of a counter-rotating pump-turbine with a new head-loss pressure boundary condition (12 min)
(Presentation at 16th OpenFOAM workshop, on-line, organized “in” Dublin, 2021)
