Journal
SUSTAINABILITY
Volume 12, Issue 15, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/su12155985
Keywords
tidal energy; horizontal axis tidal current turbine; TSR; power coefficient; CFD analysis
Funding
- Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic
- European Union (European Structural and Investment Funds Operational Program Research, Development, and Education) in the framework of the project Modular platform for autonomous chassis of specialized electric vehicles for freight and equipment transport [CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_025/0007293]
- Institute for Nanomaterials, Advanced Technologies and Innovations (CXI), Technical University of Liberec (TUL)
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The blade number of a current tidal turbine is one of the essential parameters to increase the stability, performance and efficiency for converting tidal current energy into rotational energy to generate electricity. This research attempts to investigate the effect of blade number on the performance of a small-scale horizontal tidal current turbine in the case of torque, thrust coefficient and power coefficient. Towards this end and according to the blade element momentum theory, three different turbines, i.e., two, three and four-bladed, were modeled using Solidworks software based on S-814 airfoil and then exported to the ANSYS-FLUENT for computational flow dynamics (CFD) analysis. SST-K-omega turbulence model was used to predict the turbulence behavior and several simulations were conducted at 2 <= tip speed ratio <= 7. Pressure contours, turbulence kinetic energy contours, cut-in-speed-curves, and streamlines around the blades and rotors were extracted and compared to provide an ability for a deep discussion on the turbine performance. The results show that in the case of obtainable power, the optimal value of tip speed ratio is around 5, so that the maximum power was achieved for the four-bladed turbine. Out of optimal condition, higher blade number and lower blade number turbines should be used at less than and greater than the optimal values of tip speed ratio, respectively. The results of simulations for the three-bladed turbine were validated against the experimental data with good agreement.
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