Conditioning of Tail Water Flow by Draft Tube Design - A New Approach for Low Head Hydropower

The optimization of fluid systems, i.e. draft tubes in low head hydropower stations is up to now commonly carried out by CFD analysis or based on empiric data. The reasons for that is a lack of analytical optimization methods. The present paper provides a new analytic approach to optimization of draft tubes. Furthermore it names and corrects two common fallacies in hydropower literature. The optimized draft tube design satisfies the optimal operation condition for hydropower in an open channel-flow [1].