Innovative technologies (Task 3.1)

CTI project n°17197.1
This project focuses on turning a counter rotating micro-turbine proof of concept into a range of standard energy recovery stations able to harvest energy on drinking water networks. The plug-and-play concept to be developed will require a low investment for the final customers, reaching economic feasibility with an available hydraulic power below 25 kW. A new part of the Swiss and international renewable energy potential will then be targeted and profitably exploited.

CTI Project n°17568.1
Silt erosion impedes hydropower usage which will become more critical with the observed climate changes particularly for the new glacier lakes of the Alpine region. SPHEROS software has been developed to simulate silt-laden flows in hydraulic machines, It will be enhanced with accurate physical models for erosion and new advanced high performance computing techniques. A tool fitting the industrial needs to predict and mitigate erosion of hydro generating units is targeted.

To answer to nowadays needs for sustainable energy sources that are, at the same time, economically viable and environmentally friendly, the systems must be efficient. The best efficiency is obtained when the system is designed in the way that maximizes the energy produced and minimizes the caused damage, not violating any imposed constraint. The purpose of this research is an experimental and computational investigation of energy conversion and efficiency in water systems.

This project aims to study the hydraulic, mechanical and electrical dynamics of several hydraulic machines configurations – Francis turbines, reversible pump-turbines – under an extended range of operations: from overload to deep part load. Upon suitable concurrence between simulations and reduced-scale physical models results, validation will take place on carefully selected physical hydropower plants properly equipped with monitoring systems. Tests on both experimental rigs and real power plants will be performed in order to validate the obtained methodological and numerical results.

This project aims at developing a theoretical and methodological framework for fracture mechanics, which will in particular allow for the numerical simulation of large-scale problems on recent and upcoming parallel architectures. It will exploit phase-field models as novel approaches for the representation of crack interfaces. In this project, we will use modern discretization approaches such as Isogemetric analysis (IGA) and NURBS based ansatz spaces, for which we will develop efficient adaptive techniques. Moreover, for the solution of the arising (non-)linear systems, robust preconditioners based on multilevel methods will be derived and implemented. These approaches combine the flexibility of traditional refinement techniques with a patchwise view on the discretisation, thereby allowing for the design of efficient approaches on massively parallel architectures, which profit from simple and easily maintainable data structures. In addition to the new phase-field based approach for fracture, we will also extend our new framework in order to deal with contact and frictional effects along the larger interior crack interfaces.