Learning hydraulic turbomachinery with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes.

In fluid mechanics courses of engineering curricula, theoretical performance curves of hydraulic turbines are obtained by means of simple analytical expressions that tend to overestimate experimental data. As we show here in the analysis of a laboratory-scale Pelton wheel, a much deeper physical insight can be achieved by means of general-purpose commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software programs, becoming a suitable tool for academic activities. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 684-690, 2013 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]