Abstract: The shape of the bifurcated pipe has a great impact on the head loss of a pumped-storage power station, and affects its operating benefits indirectly; optimizing the shape is a research hotspot. To reduce head loss, this paper develops a new design method of the guide plate to improve the traditional bifurcated pipe and verifies its accuracy of numerical simulations of the flows in an abrupt contraction pipe. We also compare its velocity distributions with those in the flow without this plate through numerical simulations and optimize its shape. The result shows the guide plate reduces the head loss in the bifurcated pipe section and helps stabilize flow patterns. The reduction is 43.4% and 12.6% in pumping mode and power generation mode respectively, showing a significant improvement on the power plant benefit by the optimized guide plate.

Key words: pumped-storage power station, bifurcated pipe, guide plate, head loss, CFD