The paper presented at the IAHR conferences ‘Numerical Analysis of an Initial Design of a Counter-Rotating Pump-Turbine’ has been published by IOPscience. The paper has been written by Jonathan Fahlbeck, Håkan Nilsson, Saeed Salehi, Mehrdad Zangeneh and Melvin Joseph. What’s Inside? Renewable sources of energy are on the rise and will continue to increase the coming decades. A common problem […]

Jonathan Fahlbeck*, Håkan Nilsson and Saeed Salehi released a new publication on the flow characteristics of preliminary shutdown and startup sequences for a model counter-rotating pump-turbine. Pumped Hydropower Storage (PHS) is the maturest and most economically viable technology for storing energy and regulating the electrical grid on a large scale. Due to the growing amount of […]

We would like to thank you all for your participation and contributions to the ALPHEUS Project meeting last Wednesday. The Consortium meeting had provided an opportunity for an update on the whole project: highlights per work package, experiments, project planning… Although the pandemic still forced us to organize the meeting online, it was good to […]

The ALPHEUS’ project WP2 involves the design and manufacture of a pump/turbine runner that can work in low head conditions and with high round-trip efficiency. Within the project there are several partners from European universities, a company (Advanced Design Technology Ltd.) and a research organization (IHE Delft). The proposal of the project describes briefly all […]

The growing share of intermittent renewable energy sources are creating challenges for grid stability. Energy storage is now becoming an important topic of research to ensure future growth of renewable energy. Reversible pump/turbine technology (RPT) is one of the key areas of research. But many existing RPTs require high head reservoirs which limits application to […]

Last week, Jonathan Fahlbeck, PhD Student working on the project, had the honour to represent ALPHEUS project at the 30th IAHR Symposium on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems. The presentation was on ‘Numerical analysis of an initial design of a counter-rotating pump-turbine‘. A paper of the work will be published later by the IOP Conference Series. The ALPHEUS project […]

The paper: The Contribution of Low‐head Pumped Hydro Storage to a successful Energy Transition (available here) presented at the virtual 19th Wind Integration Workshop (11 – 12 November 2020) was chosen among the best 10 papers of the whole RE Grid Integration Week 2020. The Wind Integration Workshop was designed for power system operators, transmission and […]

WP1 of ALPHEUS is project coordination. Since the start of the project in April, the tasks we have been engaged in are: • Communicating information among project work packages;• Solving the gap in the project due to the original partner BT Projects dropping out. Their responsibilities for the fish experiments are being replaced by ATKB […]

In WP3, the Power Take-Off (PTO) and machine-side control are studied and designed. In the past year, good progress has been made on both subjects. For the shaft-driven Contra-Rotating Reversible Pump-Turbine (CR RPT), many possible PTO configurations are possible. These configurations were compared based on their influence on RPT and electric machine performance, as well […]

D2.1 This report describes how the optimised initial down-scaled model design of the Shaft-Driven CounterRotating Pump-Turbine (SD-CRPT) in the ALPHEUS project was derived. A first design was made in prototype scale, according to the expected requirements of the final machines. The design was scaled to an appropriate model scale with respect to requirements from the […]