Studying the effects of jet alignment in Pelton units

A reference Pelton turbine developed at the Waterpower Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has been tested with different nozzle positions. The positions were the same in the radial direction, but had two different degrees of width-wise misalignment, leading to a difference in the jet area interacting with each side of the bucket. The tests were filmed with a Photron FastCam SA5 high speed camera, and a gradient-based edge tracing method was used on the average of each film to distinguish the position of the jet in relation to the bucket centre.