Development of the Turgo Impulse turbine: Past and present

Since its invention nearly 100 years ago, the Turgo turbine has been installed in thousands of locations across the globe. The majority of the development of the Turgo turbine design has been through the use of paper based and experimental studies however recent advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools have allowed the simulation of the complex, highly turbulent, multiphase flows associated with impulse turbines and some work has been done in applying this to the Turgo design. This review looks at the development of the of the Turgo turbine since its invention in 1919 and includes the paper-based analyses, experimental studies and the more recent CFD analyses carried out on the design.