STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF PELTON BUCKET WITH AISI 1020 STEEL AND STRUCTURAL STEEL MATERIAL BY USING SOLID WORKS AND ANSYS

Pelton Turbine is the hydraulic turbine, type of impulse turbine. An Impulse turbine generally suitable for the low flow rate and high head. The discharge water from the nozzle impacts the bucket of the Pelton wheel to produce the hydropower. There are some reasons behind the failure of the Pelton bucket like as: silt erosion, cavitation, fatigue etc. The main reason behind the fatigue failure is the material property and stress concentrations. A high concentration of stresses occurs at the root of the bucket due to its cantilever structure each time a bucket experiences the impact of the water jet. In this work, there are two materials AISI 1020 Steel and Structural Steel have been considered for analyzing the Pelton bucket. For the 3D CAD model of Pelton bucket Solid works 14.0 and for simulation work ANSYS 15.0 software has been used. In simulation work analysis types were static structural. This paper focuses on von-mises stress, total deformation of von-mises strain to analyze the suitable material for the Pelton bucket. From the obtained results it has been observed that among both materials Structural Steel is suitable for bucket due to low-stress concentration, total deformation and strain.