The Turbine Testing Lab is a large infrastructure residing in the main university compound at Dhulikhel lying at the eastern side of the newly established School of Engineering. The lab consists of two buidlings- one is the older building and the other is the newly constructed lab area. The old building, earlier known as high voltage lab, also consists of machine lab and other staff offices at its upper floor. The lower floor of the building is where the TTL office resides. The spacious office area is furnished with furnitures, desk, tables, general office appliances and above all powerful computers, sand samples collected from various rivers of Nepal, metallurgical microscopes and other lab equipment. It is capable of holding 20-30 people at a time including researchers and students. The office also boasts a mini auditorium for conducting small programmes and in-house meetings and discussions.
Rubbing its shoulder with the old building is the recently constructed main lab building. This structure houses a sophisticated and state-of-the art auditorium at its upper floor. The auditorium is capable of conducting two programmes at the same time. With a removable partition wall in the middle, the auditorium is also capable of hosting larger programmes whenever necessary. The main lab floor consists of 92 kW Francis Test Rig, Cross Flow Turbine Test Rig, Rapid Prototyping Machine, PIV Setup and other lab setups. It has two centrifugal pumps which combined can provide a total head of 150 m and/or a discharge of 300 lt/sec to supply the water in the lab during experiments. The lab has an underground reservoir of 300 m3 capacity beneath the floor with weir and calibration tank to measure the rate of flow. The upper reservoir is situated at the top of the University premises with a capacity of holding 100 m3 of water providing a natural head of 30 m. Attached to the side of the main lab building is the Variable Frequency Drive(VFD) Room whcih is the control room of the whole TTL.
Transparent View of Turbine Testing Lab
In the current system of TTL, rig can be operated in open loop. Each rig of the Turbine Testing Lab can be operated in eight different ways. Open loop using natural head can be operated in four different ways and open loop using the pump head can be operated in four different ways.
Mode: Open loop pump head – Parallel
Water from lab reservoir comes through valve 1, gets divided and goes through valve 3 and valve 2. Water reaches pump b and pump a. Discharged water from both pumps reaches the lab floor through valve 7. Water goes through the assigned test rig and falls down to the reservoir.
Mode: Open Loop natural head – Series
Water from upper reservoir comes though valve 8 and goes up to lab floor. Through the test rig it falls down to the lab reservoir. Water comes from valve 1 to valve 2 and then goes to pump a. Water from the discharge side of pump a goes to the suction side of pump b. Water then goes through valve 6 to the upper reservoir.