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In 1848 James B. Francis, while working as head engineer of the Locks and Canals company in the water wheel-powered textile factory city of Lowell, Massachusetts, [4] improved on these designs to create more efficient turbines. He applied scientific principles and testing methods to produce a very efficient turbine design.
A screw turbine at a small hydro power plant in Goryn, Poland. The Archimedean screw is an ancient invention, attributed to Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC.), and commonly used to raise water from a watercourse for irrigation purposes. In 1819 the French engineer Claude Louis Marie Henri Navier (1785–1836) suggested using the Archimedean ...
The term "foil" is used to describe the shape of the blade cross-section at a given point, with no distinction for the type of fluid, (thus referring to either an "airfoil" or "hydrofoil"). In the helical design, the blades curve around the axis, which has the effect of evenly distributing the foil sections throughout the rotation cycle, so ...
By funneling running water into a canal, this system can generate electricity
Hydropower (from Ancient Greek ὑδρο-, "water"), also known as water power or water energy, is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by converting the gravitational potential or kinetic energy of a water source to produce power. [1] Hydropower is a method of sustainable energy ...
A Bonneville Dam Kaplan turbine after 61 years of service. The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, [1] who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to achieve efficiency over a wide range of flow and water level.
Hydropower can provide large amounts of low-carbon electricity on demand, making it a key element for creating secure and clean electricity supply systems. [2] A hydroelectric power station that has a dam and reservoir is a flexible source, since the amount of electricity produced can be increased or decreased in seconds or minutes in response ...
When generating hydropower, the head is the distance that a given water source has to fall before the point where power is generated. Ultimately the force responsible for hydropower is gravity , so a hydroelectricity plant [ 1 ] with a tall/high head can produce more power than a similar plant with a short/low head.