CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1  BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT
Over the years, engineers have found many ways to utilize the impact force of fluids. For example, the Pelton wheel has been used to make flour. Further, the impulse turbine. Firemen make use of the kinetic energy stored in a jet to extinguish fires in high-rise buildings. Many other applications of fluid jets can be cited which reveals their technological importance. This experiment is designed to study the force that can be impacted by a jet of fluid on a surface diverting the flow (Khurmi, 2010).
The history of the equipment “impact of jet apparatus” is traced back to the 19thcentury. The apparatus is used to demonstrate the way a certain type of water turbine, the pelton wheel can extract water from a fast jet of water, which is similar to the way in which a space craft increases or decreases its kinetic energy by swinging around a moving plant.  Nevertheless, water turbines are used to generate power like in pelton wheel produced by an American engineer Lester A Pelton. Engineer Lester Pelton was born in the year 1892 in Vermilion Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. The invention came about when water was an under used resource and before electricity was economically practical as a motive power. The first turbine built by pelton was in Campton Ville. In Campton Ville, by the time search for gold progressed, which required power to drive stamp mills that crush the ore and pump air into mine turnnels and later to provide electricity and compressed air. Some mines used steam engines but these required a large and constant supply of fire wood. Therefore, instead of the slow water wheel traditionally used by flour mills which needed only a moderate height but used a large quantity of water, even mine owners installed turbine wheels with cups around their circumference with a fast jet of water coming from a reservoir high up (Moth, 2009).
Pelton invention started from an accidental observation when he was watching a spinning water turbine when the key holding its wheel onto its shaft slipped causing it to be misaligned. Instead of the jet hitting the wheel at the middle, the slip made it hit near the edge thus causing the wheel to spin faster. It is known that the Pelton wheel is suitable for conditions which require a 100m head of water and a flow rate which could be used to develop about 900kW of power. Over 40 years ago, the concept of performing simple experiments in hydraulics on hydraulic bench was first introduced in the University of Notingham, since then, hydraulic bench has been in use to conduct experiments with the impact of jet apparatus.
Moreover, there is need to understand how the deflection of a jet generates a force on the buckets and also to know how the force is related to the rate of change of momentum in the jet before a prediction could be made on the use of Pelton wheel (Orga and Ujam, 2005).