Cavitation study of H-Darrieus hydrokinetic turbines via numerical simulations

Abstract

This paper presents a parametric study of H-Darrieus turbines in cavitating conditions. The objective of this work is to assess the impact of cavitation on turbine performances for a wide variety of configurations and under various operating conditions. A better insight on the most “cavitation-friendly” turbine is provided by determining the optimal design parameters in terms of solidity, deployment depth, number of blades and blade pitch angle. Such design parameters are studied here and help to identify and analyse the inception and effects of cavitation. Two-dimensional URANS numerical simulations are carried out within Star-CCM+ at a Reynolds number of 107 based on the turbine diameter. The cavitating conditions simulated in this paper correspond to near-surface deployments at free-stream velocities ranging from 2 to 3 m/s. In a first phase, the solidity is varied from 0.1 to 0.7 while the tip-speed ratio is varied accordingly for optimal power coefficient. It is shown that a higher solidity turbine operating at a lower tip-speed ratio is beneficial in cavitating conditions due to the low effective velocity on the blades. The chord-to-radius ratio is varied in the second phase of this study. Turbines with 1, 3, 6 and 9 blades for a constant solidity of 0.6 are simulated and the results show that a larger chord-to-radius ratio is detrimental in cavitating conditions. Thus, the high curvature effects are to be avoided by using a larger number of blades for a given turbine solidity. The third and final phase of this study simulates turbines where the blade pitch angle was varied from −6° to +2° for a medium turbine solidity of 0.3. The small negative blade pitch angles of −2° and −4° show promising results where cavitation is greatly reduced, showing an improvement on power coefficient of 45 % for a blade pitch angle of −4° compared to the no blade pitch angle case at a cavitation number of 35. Overall, this paper concludes on the fact that the blade’s effective velocity and angle of attack are the key parameters controlling cavitation and that a combination of the studied design parameters should be considered to completely avoid cavitation inception or limit its detrimental effect on performance.