Abstract
Recently, greenhouse effect by $CO_2$ gas emitted by use of fossil fuel causes earth environmental problem. As a countermeasure of the global warming. micro hydropower under 100kW becomes the focus of attention for its clean and renewable energy sources. Newly developed micro positive displacement hydraulic turbine shows high efficiency and good applicability for the micro hydropoewer. The purpose of this study is to clarify the influence of leakage loss and effective head on the performance of the positive displacement hydraulic turbine for the further improvement of the turbine performance. The results show that the turbine. with a smaller side clearance. has much higher efficiency than that with bigger side clearance and it can sustain the high efficiency under the wider range of operation conditions. The turbine torque is proportional to the effective head and independent of the flow rate. The leakage is also dependent on the effective head but nearly independent of the flow rate.
