The paper presents a fast design method for the inlet guide vanes of low-cost mini hydraulic bulb turbines. The guide vanes are positioned between two conical surfaces with a common vertex and have constant thickness distribution, except close to the leading and the trailing edges. The conical-walled inlet guide vane row is designed using a quasi-three-dimensional calculation method, by prescribing the angular-momentum distribution along the span at the outlet section of the guide vanes. The meridional through-flow is computed by a streamline curvature method and the blade-to-blade flow by a singularity surface method. The stagger angle and the vane camber are computed to fulfil the required design circulation and zero-incidence flow at the leading edge. The final vane shape is a single-curvature surface with straight leading and trailing edges. To validate the design method, a conical-walled inlet guide vane row nozzle-model with six fixed vanes was designed, manufactured and tested in an airflow rig. Traversing measurements along the circumferential and radial directions were made with a five-hole probe. The experimental results are compared with the prescribed design conditions and with numerical results from the three-dimensional inviscid and viscous flow computed with the FLUENT code. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.