Pressure oscillations triggered by the unstable interaction of dynamic flow features of the hydraulic turbine with the hydraulic plant system - including the electrical design - can at times reach significant levels and could lead to damage of plant components or could reduce component lifetime significantly. Such a problem can arise for overload as well as for part load operation of the turbine. This paper discusses an approach to analyze the overload high pressure oscillation problem using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling of the hydraulic machine combined with a network modeling technique of the hydraulic system. The key factor in this analysis is the determination of the overload vortex rope volume occurring within the turbine under the runner which is acting as an active element in the system. Two different modeling techniques to compute the flow field downstream of the runner will be presented in this paper. As a first approach, single phase flow simulations are used to evaluate the vortex rope volume before moving to more sophisticated modeling which incorporates two phase flow calculations employing cavitation modeling. The influence of these different modeling strategies on the simulated plant behavior will be discussed.

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