Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 80, August 2015, Pages 690-698
Renewable Energy

Investigation of the performance of a staggered configuration of tidal turbines using CFD

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2015.03.001Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Performance of individual tidal turbines is accurately estimated using CFD.

  • Performance curve is established by varying body forces.

  • Influence of wake interaction on the performance of individual turbines is observed.

  • Accelerating bypass regions within small scale tidal turbine improved performances.

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of wake interaction and blockage on the performance of individual turbines in a staggered configuration in a tidal stream farm using the CFD based Immersed Body Force turbine modelling method. The inflow condition to each turbine is unknown in advance making it difficult to apply the correct loading to individual devices. In such cases, it is necessary to establish an appropriate range of operating points by varying the loading or body forces in order to understand the influence of wake interaction and blockage on the performance of the individual devices. The performance of the downstream turbines was heavily affected by the wake interaction from the upstream turbines, though there were accelerated regions within the farm which could be potentially used to increase the overall power extraction from the farm. Laterally closely packed turbines can improve the performance of those turbines due to the blockage effect, but this could also affect the performance of downstream turbines. Thus balancing both the effect of blockage and wake interaction continues to be a huge challenge for optimising the performance of devices in a tidal stream farm.

Keywords

CFD
IBF model
Power extraction
Wake interaction
Blockage

Cited by (0)