Horse Power Calculations of Pelton Turbine?

Question

If you had 1,000 bars of pressure and 900,000 litres of water per minute, what horse power would you be able to achive with a pelton? What is the equation to use?

Answer 1

Available flow power P = Qρ, where ρ is the pressure, and Q is the volume rate.
Net power would be this theoretical value * an efficiency factor η, which is typically considered to be about 0.85 maximum but the ref. says can be 0.92 in modern Pelton designs.
So convert bars to Pascals (mult. by 100,000), liters/min to m^3/s (div. by 60,000), and watts to HP (div. by 745.7) and you have a theoretical output of 2,008,800 HP. Then multiply by your estimate of pump efficiency. It might take a thousand or so turbines to manage this.
I have to say that 1000 bar is a high head for a natural water source, about 10,000 m. On which planet can you find that?

Answer 2

The pressure is irrelevant - but I'm quite sure you need the speed of the water (in theory, I think you also need the radius of the Pelton paddles - but you can approximate this with zero and you wont be far off).
Then you can do the following:
The rim of a Pelton moves at half the speed of the water; the water comes to a full stop at the end of the paddle. So you can compute the deceleration of the water; from this and the mass you get the force, and from the force and the speed you get the power (and if something here cancels out, then it is even easier :-) ).

Answer 3

There is a book named "Fluid Mechanics" by Modi Seth.
In this book you will find notes on Pelton Wheel and all the design and calculation procedure required.Definitely you will find the equation for calculating power from a pelton wheel.Simply equate your values in the equation and get the appropriate answer.

Answer 4

you can ask this question to your physics teacher.

Thanks
James