Hydro-abrasive erosion in hydro turbines: a review

The flow of sediment particles in rivers is a big challenge to develop hydropower plants across the sediment-laden rivers. Hard particles such as quartz and feldspar are available in high amount in the Asian mountain range. The abrasive action of these particles causes the hydro turbines to suffer from erosion in particular at high- and medium-head hydroelectric power plants. This has become a serious economic issue due to maintenance costs and production losses. The treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable. Facilities for sediment exclusion, typically sand traps as well as turbine design, and materials have been improved considerably. In the present paper, studies have been discussed extensively undertaken by several investigators in this field. Based on literature survey several aspects related to reducing the sediment load on turbines, useful ways to improve the turbine surface performance and various erosion models to characterize the effect of erosion on the performance of turbines have been discussed. To calibrate and validate the developed erosion models, more measurements from both physical model tests in laboratories and continuous monitoring of sediment parameters and their impact on the operational hydro turbines are required. As well as the state-of-art in the modeling and simulation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has made it possible to optimize the hydraulic design of hydro turbines in order to minimize the erosion level without much sacrifice in the efficiency. To mitigate the hydro-abrasive erosion effects on the performance of turbines, significant improvements have been achieved so far and development is ongoing.