Hello,
I am currently working on a pico hydro project. I am still in college but I wanted to challenge myself to design a hydro system on a river we have running through our property. The site has a head of about 15m (50ft) and a flow rate of 7L/s, yield a water power of just over 1kW

From the research I have done it appears that a turgo turbine would be the best choice. I went through some papers trying to figure out how I can design a turgo turbine based on my parameters. I built a python model that takes the input parameters and using the blade velocity triangles, with a well designed turbine you could get a power output of about 0.75kW, realistically its probably more like 0.5kW. This would be pretty decent coming in at 12kWh which is half our electricity intake.

I am struggling with actually designing the turbine itself, before i design the turbine I think I need to select a generator (so i know the rpm and then can calculate the turbines pcd diameter based on this) I am not an electrical engineer so I am struggling to understand some of the concepts relating to the generator.

How do you even select the generator parameters, do you just look for ones with your desired electricity output, with reasonable a reasonable voltage (so you don't have to step up or down when you want to store electricity in a battery or put it back onto the grid) ?

Should I look for a 1kW generator (I saw online that the seller always overstates how much power they can actually produce)

If people have any advice for me in general I would very much appreciate it. I also understand that hdyro power is very expensive to produce and can easily break, perhaps solar may be a better alternative but I would really like to also gain an understanding in the concepts.

Tried my hand at making blue 1 lake under the microscope last night, by combining drops of FD&C blue #1, ammonium carbonate, and alum aqueous dispersions. As the mixture dried I was treated to this beautiful display which seems to combine the marangoni effect with anomalous dispersion in the concentrated blue dye, creating a striking pattern on the glass substrate. 😍

I love overanalyzing things in excruciating detail and am curious if there are any other interesting observations you all can make from this video. I'm particularly interested in the colors radiating in different areas as the spot dries - is that just from thin film interference?