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A water wheel is a machine for converting the kinetic energy of flowing or falling water into useful forms of power, often in a watermill. A water wheel consists of a large wheel (usually constructed from wood or metal), with numerous blades or buckets attached to the outer rim forming the drive mechanism. Water wheels were still in commercial ...
Old Pelton wheel from Walchensee Hydroelectric Power Station, Germany. The Pelton wheel or Pelton Turbine is an impulse-type water turbine invented by American inventor Lester Allan Pelton in the 1870s. [1] [2] The Pelton wheel extracts energy from the impulse of moving water, as opposed to water's dead weight like the traditional overshot ...
The main difference between early water turbines and water wheels is a swirl component of the water which passes energy to a spinning rotor. This additional component of motion allowed the turbine to be smaller than a water wheel of the same power. They could process more water by spinning faster and could harness much greater heads.
Micro hydro is frequently accomplished with a pelton wheel for high head, low flow water supply. The installation is often [when?] [where?] just a small dammed pool, at the top of a waterfall, with several hundred feet of pipe leading to a small generator housing. In low head sites, [example needed] generally water wheels and Archimedes' screws ...
A schematic presentation of a gravitation water vortex power plant, showing the turbine in yellow. The gravitation water vortex power plant is a type of micro hydro vortex turbine system which converts energy in a moving fluid to rotational energy using a low hydraulic head of 0.7–3 metres (2 ft 4 in – 9 ft 10 in). This technology is based ...
Nineteenth-century efficiency improvements of water turbines allowed them to replace nearly all water wheel applications and compete with steam engines wherever water power was available. After electric generators were developed in the late 1800s, turbines were a natural source of generator power where potential hydropower sources existed.
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Both potential and kinetic energy are harvested, providing higher energy extraction efficiency than a kinetic energy only approach. This is the principal difference between traditional water wheels and the water wall turbine design. It is this difference that allows a water wall turbine to operate effectively in low head environments.