Pelton wheel bucket produced by wire-laser additive manufacturing
The Pelton turbine is a turbine whose bucket wheel drives the alternator shaft in rotation under the action of water. The heavily stressed buckets split the water jet and deflect it to the sides, ensuring optimum turbine efficiency.
When manufacturing a Pelton wheel, additive manufacturing makes it possible to produce a Pelton wheel on demand from a forged disc, by directly adding “bucket” features, layer by layer, as close as possible to the final surfaces, with just the right amount of material required.
IREPA LASER and Welding Alloys combined their expertise to produce a bucket using the wire-laser technology (WLAM) industrialised and marketed by AMFREE. Using reverse engineering based on a 3D scan of an existing Pelton bucket, the project team generated a digital model of the deposits to be made and the robot’s tool paths, and simulated the build to ensure risk-free manufacturing.
In its additive manufacturing plant equipped with the PAMPROD industrial pilot line, IREPA LASER implements AMFREE multi-wire laser technology (Wire Laser Additive Manufacturing). The patented deposition head makes it possible to melt several metal wires simultaneously in order to deposit more than 1000 cm3 of fused material while guaranteeing optimum process stability and without interruption.
The resulting bucket measures 360 mm high and 340 mm wide. It took 14 hours to deposit 61 kg of material supplied by Welding Alloys.
