DIVE-Turbine in ecological flow and fish ladder attraction

November 2017

In September 2017, one more DIVE-Turbine of 110kW has been set into operation in power plant Las Rives at the river Ariége in the south of France. It is the second fixed-runner speed DIVE-Turbine in power plant Las Rives.Due to the European Water Framework Directive the requirements for the minimum ecological flow have been raised. This enables new potential to be efficiently and reliably used with the DIVE-Turbine. Moreover, the additional flow is located directly at the entrance of the fish ladder and therefore attracts fish to find the fish ladder. With these qualities the power plant plays an important role in the ecological improvement of power plant Las Rives.

Even the runner design was adapted to implement an overall ecologic concept: The common runner diameter for the given head and discharge of approx. 800mm had been raised to 1080mm to reduce the max. runner speed to 35% of the original runner speed. Also the runner design is fish friendly as it has only 3 runner blades.

The fixed runner speed design of the turbine with permanent magnet generator minimizes the expense in design, electrotecnical equipment and control while in the same time the efficiency is rising at 80%-100% of discharge, because there are no inverter losses.

A fixed speed turbine can be applied at sites with constant discharge, especially in ecological flow or power plants with several turbines in parallel operation: in parallel operation it is sufficient when one of the turbines is double regulated by speed-variation and the rest of the turbines is operated with fix speed and without inverter losses. Therefore the overall efficiency and operation reliability can be maximized with fixed-speed turbines while in the same time minimizing the investment cost.

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