Exploitation of the Hydrokinetic Potential of Rivers by Combining the Traditional Water Wheel and the Darrieus Turbine

Preliminary notes The kinetic energy of river currents is weakly researched for the possibility of production of electrical energy. Thus there are very few new suggestions for the exploitation of this energy form. This paper shows a method of exploiting the hydrokinetic energy of river currents created by combining the traditional water wheel and the Darrieus turbine. The water wheel is used due to its historic and traditional meaning and the Darrieus turbine is added due to the increase of the overall power of such a facility. Considering the small dimensions of a micro hydroenergy power plant of this type it is necessary to precisely determine the most favorable locations. For these locations the most important data are the speed and depth of the water flow because the power in using hydrokinetic energy depends upon the third exponent of speed, and depth is important because the Darrieus turbine is immersed in water. Thus, the model of optimizing locations is done based on the data received by measuring the hydrological characteristics of the watercourse using the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) device.