Pelton Turbine
A turbine made for a class competition. Its purpose is to pull a 1 Newton weight a distance of 20 feet with 1L of water. Me and my teammate, Owen, accomplished to do so in 4.9 seconds. Shown below is the assembly, which was also previously shown in the thumbnail.
Check out more details about this project below.
Optimal turbine dimensions selected with this diagram.
Teammate did the calculations for the stand to find values for jet diameter, jet velocity, and jet angle. I used those values to find the optimal pitch diameter and the bucket dimensions.
Found the number of buckets needed using this diagram.
There is a curve labeled “number of buckets” that helped us find that we needed 21 buckets for a wheel ratio of about 15.5.
Created a CAD model, put the STL file into Prusa Slicer, and printed the turbine body and buckets.
The individual buckets were joined to the bucket using M4 screws.
Another picture of the 3D print in action.
Shows all the buckets being printed simultaneously.
Ready for competition.
Unfortunately I forgot what our placement was.
However, we successfully pulled the 1 Newton weight of pennies a distance of 20 feet in 4.9 seconds, using 1 Liter of water in the bucket.
Alexander Aguilar 