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The present paper is part of a larger project whose purpose is to develop a new hydrokinetic turbine-generator assembly, suitable for very low head water courses. It presents the experimental results of a turbine--generator physical model, installed on the tailrace of Mihailesti Hydropower Plant. In order to carry out the measurements, a floating structure and an anchoring system was installed on the power plant tailrace. This system also allowed the translation of the assembly between the two shores. A first set of measurements followed the water velocity and depth in the channel at various load values of the hydropower plant units, in order to determine the proper conditions for testing the model. The turbine gives the possibility of blades adjustment at three different angles, 0, 9 and 14 degrees respectively. Therefore, a set of measurements has been performed for each position of the blades. The measured parameters were the electric parameters of the generator such as voltage, current and the power variation with rotation speed. For the blades adjustment of 9 degrees and 1.76 m/s water velocity, the generator reached its maximum power of 500 W. The results retrieved will be used for the optimization and design of a new enlarged scale turbine--generator assembly. They will also be used as input data for the numerical modeling of the generator. Also, the exact knowledge of the channel geometry and flow parameters is valuable in studies preceding testing a prototype in the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geometric data for a broken blade of a horizontal axis micro-hydrokinetic turbine were obtained by reverse engineering and, reconstructed model was validated by re-engineering process and experiment. A direct scanning procedure was applied in order to verify the blade profile and stagger angles. Two computation methods were used in order to validate technical data of the turbine. For the first was used the classical computation method and, for the second method, the principle of extraction the maximum power from the fluid flow was considered. Differences for stagger angles of the blades were found, and an increased hydraulic power of 7%, when using the second design method comparing to the initial data. After re-engineering, the new runner was manufactured by a rapid prototyping method and was tested for data validation. Experiments confirmed the theoretical results with a good precision. Increased hydraulic power by 5% was recorded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]