well as my post completely vanished here I go again (quickly and unformatted with hardly any details not spending another hr on something that will vanish )
http://lurkertech.com/water/pump/tailer/
I have a constant flow of 300 LPM that I wish to recapture some of the energy from to trickle feed my grow towers
ideally would be great to get 10m head and to recapture 1%+ of the water flow ie 3 LPM
I was thinking of creating 10cm x 10cm channel , this should give me .6ms flow rate ~ 2 fps with my 300 LPM flow rate
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~xzf0001/Handbook/Channels.html
now somewhere on the net I found an example that said water wheel should be 3~6 times the water flows head height
average velocity x average velocity / 64.4 = 2.55 foot head
x6 for max efficenty size = 9.3 foot dia wheel or 2.8m
now my flow rate is .6 ms , 2 fps 1/5 their flow rate so I would expect a wheel size of around 50cm ( 2.8m / 5 ) with 20 coils to reach my 10m head ( apparently each coil is double the head ? still yet to find formula just going by youtube video's )
however when I calculated from scratch with 2 fps I got 0.06211180124 foot head and 0.3726708075 foot wheel = 11cm , not exactly what I was expecting ...
I am restricted with a very low head ideally I would rather 5cm head in the water channel as I use airlift pumps and this is a re-circulating system of 20 kl fish tank
I was thinking of making blades from 90 mm PVC pipe split in half for the curved blades
still looking for non-kinking hose I could make a tight coil from
any help on formulas to help me build once would be greatly appreciated
