Construction of Pump-Turbine Characteristics at Any Specific Speed by Domain-Partitioned Transformation

Pump-turbine characteristics are important for designing pumped-storage plants and indispensable for simulating hydraulic transients, but are often not available in the preliminary design stage. Therefore, constructing a set of pump-turbine characteristics is necessary, when no suitable characteristics at the same specific speed can be used for substitution. In this paper, we propose a new method for pump-turbine characterization at any specific speed using a database of 25 available sets of pump-turbine characteristics. The intersecting curves, defined by the intersections of the characteristic curves with a coordinate axis, are formularized to prepare for the characterization primarily. Next is an introduction of a transformation method for characteristic curves base on domain partition, through which the curves are transformed into eight characteristic surface meshes in eight separate domains. Then, we present the construction procedures in each domain, which include merging the transformed surface meshes for all the sets of collected characteristic curves into a cube mesh, constructing a super surface by interpolation to construct the regular characteristic surface meshes for an arbitrary specific speed, and transforming the constructed meshes reversely to get the conventional characteristic curves. This method is verified by comparing them to measured characteristic curves with reasonable accuracies.