A micro Francis turbine for smart water meter self-generation: Study on the effects of structural parameters on turbine performance based on CFD simulations and experiments

Longcheng Li, Daoli Zhao, Weipeng Sun and Qiuhong Huang

Energy, 2025, vol. 328, issue C

Abstract: With the popularization of smart water meters, the application of self-generation technology in the field of water meters has attracted much attention. Traditional smart water meters often require disposable battery power supply, which has problems such as battery power limitation and large workload of replacing batteries, and the replaced batteries will also cause pollution to the environment. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposed a micro Francis turbine applied to self-generation of smart water meters, and the effects of turbine structural parameters on turbine performance was investigated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experiments. Through the theoretical design and optimization of the stay vane inlet angle and the blade numbers, the hydraulic turbine prototype for testing was obtained. After turbine performance tests, it was demonstrated that the micro Francis turbine was capable of generating a stable electrical energy output with acceptable water head reduction even at low water flow rates. Based on the verified numerical model, the effects of runner inlet width and runner outlet diameter on turbine performance are investigated by CFD simulation. The simulated results show that the optimized hydraulic turbine had an output power of 2.68 W and an efficiency of 70.1 %.

Keywords: Micro Francis turbine; Self-power generation; CFD simulation; Smart water meters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544225015075
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:328:y:2025:i:c:s0360544225015075

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2025.135865

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().