DESIGN & FABRICATION OF VERTICAL TURBINE FOR RURAL MICRO HYDROELECTRIC GENERATION

Increasing demands of electricity nowadays has put to the tremendous developments and innovation of hydro turbine. In remote area, limited electricity sources are one of the reasons for developing a small scale of hydro turbine. With this small scale, it has the most cost effective energy sources and provides a clean electricity generation. A zero head water turbine has been selected as a source for electricity in off grid rural area where the construction of dam is not required. This paper discusses the experiment of Design & Fabrication of Vertical Turbine for Rural Micro Hydroelectric Generation. It consists of Background Study of the project, Problem Statement, Objective, Scope of Study, Literature Review for the relevance topic, Methodology and final Result, Conclusion and Recommendations to improvise the experiment. In this project, the author design and fabricate the vertical crossflow run river turbine based on the relevant parameters and determine the power output that can be produced from the turbine. Basically, the scope of study is to get the possible power output, minimum of 1KW based on all the possible information about the river and the parameters of the turbine. In this experiment, design of the turbine blades has been change from semicircular to flat blades. This is due to fabrication problem that might affect the accuracy of the power output. However, the power produced is very limited due to some circumstances and fabrication problems. The minimum power produced is 3.2 volt when the velocity is about 2m/s. At the end of this research, several recommendations have been made to improve the power that could be generated from the turbine.