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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 ...
Watermill of Braine-le-Château, Belgium (12th century) Interior of the Lyme Regis watermill, UK (14th century). A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower.It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering.
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.
Schematic diagram of an overshot water wheel. Date: 11 March 2007 (original upload date) (Original text: March 11, 2007) Source: Transferred from to Commons. (Original text: Original artwork by Daniel M. Short) Author: The original uploader was DanMS at English Wikipedia. (Original text: Daniel M. Short) Other versions
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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 ...
Water wheels of different types have been used for more than 1,000 years to power mills of all types, but they were relatively inefficient. 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.
Typical efficiency of water wheels exploiting only the kinetic energy was around 30%. [1] These wheels are called stream water wheels, or kinetic water wheels. Instead, undershot water wheels are used in low head sites, like less than 1.5 m, and they also exploit the potential energy of the flow, with efficiencies of up to 84%.