Using Pumps as Turbines Combined with Pumps for Water Supply in an Efficient Way without the Need of Electrical Power

In cooperation of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and KSB AG currently innovative concepts for using pumps as turbines for exploitation of drinking water are developed as a part of the German-Indonesian jointproject 'Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Indonesia†funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Thus, pumps will be operated inversely to use the hydropower potential as lowcost alternative to conventional turbines. Besides low investment costs, they are characterized by robust designs and low operational and maintenance costs. Additionally, by coupling a pump running as turbine directly to a normal operating pump such an aggregate can deliver water without the need of electrical power at all. This paper discusses theoretically attainable efficiencies of such coupled modules related to different technical designs and different pump and turbine heads, to give a more general overview for very different hydraulic conditions. Main focus is the robustness and simplicity and its implication on attainable efficiency and, especially, if usage of any kind of gearboxes between pump and ‘pump as turbine’ is reasonable.

Reversely operating pumps represent a sustainable technology especially for local use in emerging countries. For that, particular attention has to be paid to the robustness and simplicity of the application. For example, in Indonesia such combined modules are used in karst cave Bribin to utilize underground river water. Using the modules with a gearbox under the given extreme boundary conditions like in Bribin (all-season high temperatures and humidity, narrowness below ground, etc.) stresses the local technical (e.g. double effort for alignment of the module’s components, maintenance of the gearbox) and logistic (e.g. provision of an appropriate lubricant) capabilities severely. For example, during the construction of Bribin hydropower plant, due to the narrowness, the modules could not be inserted into the cave on the pre-installed base frame and thus had to be dismantled prior to the final installation. This required a re-alignment which caused a high effort due to technical limitations. Furthermore, the provision of an appropriate lubricant was also very difficult due to the fact that only a few of the common lubricants known in industrial nations are locally available. Therefore, an adaption of the module design to the local technical as well as non-technical boundary conditions is strongly required.
This technology of above mentioned conveying modules may also be applied successfully in ‚highly developed countries‘. For this kind of utilization, the focus will change from simplicity of design to high efficiency of the application. Or maybe there are special requirements with regard to all-time-availability, for instance like bilge pumps in pumped-storage power stations in Austria. They must be available even if the electrical network brakes down totally. This could be guaranteed by usage of such simple modules, using high head but low flow to turbine and low head but certain flow to be pumped.



Copyright: © DIV Deutscher Industrieverlag GmbH
Quelle: GWF International 2012 (September 2012)
Seiten: 4
Preis: € 4,00
Autor: Dr.-Ing. Jochen Fritz
Dipl.-Ing. Wolfgang Rösler
Dipl.-Ing. Daniel Stoffel
Dr.-Ing. Peter Oberle
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Franz Nestmann
 
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