The scope of the Institute's activities ranges from general fluid mechanics issues to hydraulic machinery and hydropower plants. The focus is on renewable energies: turbomachinery in hydropower, hydropower plants, ocean current turbines and tidal current predictions, wave energy and other energy conversion machinery.
Research
The research of the Institute focuses on incompressible flows, that is liquid and gas flows with low Mach number, and flows with little compressibility. The main topics are currently turbulent flows in turbomachinery at extreme off-design conditions, design and optimization of turbomachinery, two-phase flows with and without cavitation and transient phenomena of power plants. Both numerical simulation and experimental methods in the laboratory and in prototype installations are applied.
The Institute has a closed loop water test rig, an open channel test rig, as well as other smaller test facilities. It is also equipped with a sound measurement chamber for the investigation of hydraulic elements.
For investigations of flows with numerical methods, powerful PCs and a small computational cluster are available at the Institute. Furthermore, the Institute has access to the supercomputer of the High Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart.
Teaching
In teaching we offer various lectures and exercises in the specialization course "Fluid Mechanics and Hydropower” as well as a basic course in fluid mechanics.