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Description
of the Technology
This
Technology refers to a catamaran for creating a net head that stands
anchored at the middle of a river tied to the river sides by means of
cables and fixed to the riverbed by means of stakes, composed by two
profiled floats connected together with a floor plane that constitutes
the floor of a symmetric channel formed between the floats containing a
narrower zone of determined width, where water flows with higher
strength than the river stream, moving a low head water wheel mounted on
both floats that drives electrical generator(s) standing on the float(s),
each float containing mounts to sustain a bridge that includes a middle
tray between the mounts and two side trays each from one mount to the
river side, all together providing means to extract power from
run-of-river streams on a higher number profitable sites where the
streams could not be very strong, recommended for low depth rivers where
marine traffic is almost inexistent and a bridge that can be easily
assembled allowing pedestrian or light loadings to cross between river
sides.
The inside channel is formed by an inlet converging zone of
compression, an intermediate zone of narrower cross section (gorge) where
flow loading is significantly higher than the
outside free stream loading and finally by an exhaust diverging zone where a suction effect is generated by diffusion of the inside flow and
deflection of the outside stream nearby the channel outlet.
The
floats stand attached to each other by a floor plan forming planar
symmetry channel with hydroreactor profile being the channel
width defined by a quadratic decrease
at the inlet converging zone, a minimum constant channel width at the intermediate zone
where is the water wheel and an
initial accentuated increase and almost null final increase of the channel
width at the outlet diverging zone. The distance between the imaginary
plane defining the center and the external float surfaces is defined by a soft quadratic increase
at the inlet converging zone, and a slight linear decrease with
same inclination at intermediate and outlet diverging zones.
A
special water wheel with optimized design bucket is used, to get the
best performance on low fall streaming flows.
The
generated electrical power is transmitted by electrical cables lied on
the riverbed to a central station at river side, where electrical power
store and conversion is performed.
The
general dimensions of the planar symmetry channel of hydroreactor
profile are taken with relation to the with wt
of the channel at the narrower zone, being: the maximum width between
the external surfaces of the floats about 4.5 times higher than wt and the floats length about 7 times higher than wt.
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