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In fluid mechanics courses of engineering curricula, theoretical performance curves of hydraulic turbines are obtained by means of simple analytical expressions that tend to overestimate experimental data. As we show here in the analysis of a laboratory-scale Pelton wheel, a much deeper physical insight can be achieved by means of general-purpose commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software programs, becoming a suitable tool for academic activitiesThis work has been partially funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya under grant 2009-SGR-374, the MICINN under grant FIS-2009-13050, and the European Commission under grant NEST-28192-FEPR