Hydrodynamic performance evaluation of a new hydrofoil design for marine current turbines

M Tarfaoui,M Rouway,M Nachtane,D Saifaoui

doi:10.1016/j.matpr.2020.04.346

Abstract

Tidal energy has clear potential in producing large amounts of energy as the world’s capacity exceeds 120 GW. Despite being one of the oldest renewable energy sources exploited by man, the technology is still in its pre-commercialisation stage and so lags behind other renewable sources such as wind and geothermal energy in terms of development and energy produced. One of the emerging energy extraction technologies in the tidal energy field is the Horizontal Axis Hydrokinetic Turbine (HAHT) which harness tidal stream energy the same way Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) extract energy from the wind. While HAHT has been the topic of many researches over the past decade, design of hydrofoils plays a vital role in increasing the structural strength of the blade and maximizing the output of the marine current turbines. In this context, a numerical investigation is conducted in this research in which new hydrofoil for marine current turbines underwater conditions was designed and evaluated. The turbine blade is designed using XFLR5 code and QBlade which is a Blade-Element Momentum solver with a blade design feature. Then, the hydrodynamic performance of hydrofoil was tested using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) consisting of lift and drag coefficients, and velocities distribution. The results showed that the new design of the hydrofoil of marine current turbine blade maintained a CPower value of 50% more from normal range at the TSR 5 to 9 and 51% more at TSR = 6,5 in the performance curve.

Highlights

The issue of global warming is becoming a one of the vital concerns for the mankind and rapidly becoming a huge distress in social media because of its alarming negative impact on the environment [1,2,3,4]
The world has come together to fight this problem by increasing the use of renewable energies for their energy production and this led to the development of a Abbreviations: HAHT, Horizontal Axis Hydrokinetic Turbine; CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics; CPower, Coefficient of power; TSR, Tip speed ratio; TCTs, Tidal current turbine; EMEC, European Center for Marine Energy; NACA, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; Blade Element Momentum (BEM), Boundary Element Method; CL, Coefficient of lift; CD, Coefficient of Drag; AOA, Angle of Attack; CP min, Coefficient of pressure
WORTMANN (FX74-CL5-140) airfoil, suited for low Reynolds number regime and high lift ability, was selected for analysis and a new hydrofoil was designed by changing the shape of WORTMANN to improve its hydrodynamic characteristics and to make it operate at the necessary requirement for hydrokinetic turbines

Summary

Introduction

The issue of global warming is becoming a one of the vital concerns for the mankind and rapidly becoming a huge distress in social media because of its alarming negative impact on the environment [1,2,3,4]. Ahmed [18] performed an overall evaluation of the structure of the blade to utilize it in TCTs. Goundar et al [19] studied the HF10XX series of the blade to design a 3-bladed horizontal axis tidal current turbine rotor of 10 m diameter (HF present the abbreviation of the hydrofoil). Goundar et al [19] studied the HF10XX series of the blade to design a 3-bladed horizontal axis tidal current turbine rotor of 10 m diameter (HF present the abbreviation of the hydrofoil) They designed the blade using new hydrofoil design, with different thickness of each hydrofoil with respective to the position and achieved the maximum power of 150 kW and maximum efficiency of 47.5% at the 2 m/s current rate.

Hydrofoil selection

Qblade software validation

Choice of numerical parameters and solution algorithms

Results of CFD simulation

Conclusions and future development scopes

Conflicts of interest