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How much water does it take?
i was curious if anyone could tell me how much water (pressure/ volume) it takes to turn a small hydro power generator? I ask because i have about 120 ft. of fall from the top of my property to the bottom. I was curious how hard it would be be to gravity water through a hydro station at the lower end.
I plan on reading up on some small generators , but thought someone has probably already knows the answer.The ones i seen on another post did not get into the pressure volume information.
Thanks for any help you could give.
Comments
Best Answer 10 years ago
You need to know how much VOLUME of water you can drop through the turbine per second.
I'm doing the calculations in metric units. 120 feet is 36.6 metres.
Every US gallon (3.78 litres) weighs 3.78 kg, so if you drop that, you release 3.78 x g x 36.6 Joules every second.
That scales directly with volume, so half the flow, half the power,twice the flow, twice the power.
= 1378 Joules/second, and joule per second = 1Watt, so you have 1.3 kW of power to play with.
You'll lose some energy in the process, and you don't use a waterwheel if you can help it, you'd use a Pelton wheel or a water turbine for preference.
Steve
10 years ago
thanks everyone . that helps alot . I wil investigate more. andy
10 years ago
Not sure if this would be the best answer, but check this out here and here.
It's called a Gravitational Vortex Generator. Really cool.
Anyway, hope this helps.
10 years ago
input = output. So long as the flow is constant (ish) you can expect to extract whatever energy you put into the water system. Virtually any size turbine is available. Ep = mgh.