Energy Production in Water Distribution Networks: A PAT Design Strategy

Pump operating as turbine (PAT) is an effective source of reducing the equipment cost in small hydropower plants. However, the manufacturers provide poor information on the PAT performance thus representing a limit for its wider diffusion. Additional implementation difficulties arise under variable operating conditions, characteristic of water distribution networks (WDNs). WDNs allow to obtain widespread and globally significant amount of produced energy by exploiting the head drop due to the network pressure control strategy for leak reductions. Thus a design procedure is proposed that couples a parallel hydraulic circuit with an overall plant efficiency criteria for the market pump selection within a WDN. The proposed design method allows to identify the performance curves of the PAT that maximizes the produced energy for an assigned flow and pressure-head distribution pattern. Finally, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is shown as a suitable alternative for performance curve assessment covering the limited number of experimental data.