Pump as turbine (PAT) is one of the best alternatives for fulfilling the energy demands and providing the electricity in remote and rural areas. Economic development through renewable energy and sustainable energy sector creates more employment, which leads to social development of the nation. One of the reasons for the micro hydro left undeveloped is because of economic constraints. Although the running cost for micro hydro scale is very low, the initial capital cost is high, especially the turbines cost. Using pump as turbine (PAT) is an attractive and significant alternative.

In this paper, numerical investigations of radial flow centrifugal pump by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are performed. Pump manufactures do not normally provide the characteristic curves of their pumps in reverse operation, so pump was operated in both direct and reverse modes. When centrifugal pump operated in pump mode, the efficiency was observed as 70% that to turbine mode as 35.45%. It was clear that pump relatively operated as turbine.

centrifugal pump, pump as turbine, computational fluid dynamics, hydropower schemes.