Frequent shifts of output and operating mode require a pump turbine with excellent stability. Current researches show that large partial flow conditions in pump mode experience positive-slope phenomena with a large head drop. The pressure fluctuation at the positive slope is crucial to the pump turbine unit safety. The operating instabilities at large partial flow conditions for a pump turbine are analyzed. The hydraulic performance of a model pump turbine is tested with the pressure fluctuations measured at unstable operating points near a positive slope in the performance curve. The hydraulic performance tests show that there are two separated positive-slope regions for the pump turbine, with the flow discharge for the first positive slope from 0.85 to 0.91 times that at the maximum efficiency point. The amplitudes of the pressure fluctuations at these unstable large partial flow conditions near the first positive slope are much larger than those at stable operating condtions. A dominant frequency is measured at 0.2 times the impeller rotational frequency in the flow passage near the impeller exit, which is believed to be induced by the rotating stall in the flow passage of the wicket gates. The test results also show hysteresis with pressure fluctuations when the pump turbine is operated near the first positive slope. The hysteresis creates different pressure fluctuations for those operation points even though their flow rates and heads are similar respectively. The pressure fluctuation characteristics at large partial flow conditions obtained by the present study will be helpful for the safe operation of pumped storage units.

Large eddy simulations were used to investigate unsteady tip-leakage cavitating flow over a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 0009 hydrofoil. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) was combined with fast Fourier transforms to help better understand the deformation dynamics of the vortex and cavity. The results show three typical vortices, i.e., the tip-leakage vortex (TLV), tip-separation vortex (TSV), and shedding–trailing vortex (STV) with their own helical core lines in the averaged cavitating flows. Upstream of x/C = 1.8, the mean TLV core carries the breathing mode waves through the vortex dilatation effect, while the TSV core generates the dilatation, shrinkage, and bending distortions near the cavity interface by vortex stretching and deflection effects. Further downstream, the TLV starts to intertwine with the TSV, and the STV gradually diffuses. The TLV wandering encourages large cavity deformations dominated by the breathing and bending modes. However, in the lower-order POD modes, the contribution of bending modes to the cavity fluctuation energy is greatly weakened due to the variation of the relative cavity radius, r^*, which indicates that the breathing mode and the double helix mode play major roles in the cavity interfacial waves. The results also show that the cavity interfacial oscillations are highly correlated with the surrounding velocity fluctuations. Moreover, a modified theoretical dispersion equation can well reproduce the quantitative relation between the vibration frequencies and the axial wavenumbers of the TLV cavity, especially for the wave dynamics of the breathing modes and the double helix modes.