Which blocks could I use to model a hydraulic turbine in Simscape?

I am trying to model a turbine for offgrid electricity generation.

Simscape fluids includes several pump blocks which can be parameterized with characteristic curves of a system, but no turbines.

The idea would be to have a flow of water descending from one reservoir to another with a fixed height differential, a valve would be inserted before the turbine (to add friction, hence the total head seen by the turbine and therefore flow and hydraulic and mechanical power generated).

How can I go about modeling this using physical blocks in the Simscape libraries. I have seen Simulink versions of this but I would like to achieve it through Simscape

Thank you

Answer 1

[Yifeng Tang]

Some ideas:

This hydraulic motor may be useful, though I suspect the shape of its performance curve may not be like that of a turbine. You MAY be able to play with the efficiency tables to get close.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/hydro/ref/fixeddisplacementmotoril.html

You may also try to piece two rotational converters together like in this block: https://www.mathworks.com/help/hydro/ref/doubleactingrotaryactuatoril.html (note the first picture).

In fact, I believe in Simscape Onramp, there is an example of "Hydroelectric Power Model", which uses this converter block to get mechanical power from hydraulic power. You may attach variable resistance or restriction blocks parallel to the "turbine" to model the leakage. Parametrization will take time, and you'd be likely to need some 1D or 2D lookup tables to mimic the turbine curves/surfaces. The 2nd picture in the link above shows the basic idea.