Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 157, September 2020, Pages 1274-1288
Renewable Energy

Review
A review on the technologies, design considerations and numerical models of tidal current turbines

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2020.04.155Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Up-to-date review tidal current technologies projects.

  • Current state-of-research on recent design of hydrofoils for the horizontal axis current turbine (HATCT).

  • A comprehensive review on the numerical models used in the design of TCT including the hydrodynamic and structural models.

Abstract

Tidal current turbine is one of the innovative and emerging technologies of marine renewable energies because it offers constant and predictable energy source that can be very beneficial, especially for commercial scale production of electrical power. Hydrofoils (HF) are essential elements of tidal current turbine (TCT) and should be properly designed as they play a vital role in improving the turbine output and providing adequate resistance to the blade structure. In connection with the hydrofoil designs, it is noteworthy that the primary objectives in their designs are to increase the coefficient of lift and to reduce the coefficients of drag and pitching moment, thus delaying the cavitation phenomenon. In this paper, the technology developments of the hydrofoil designs used in the horizontal axis TCT industry are reviewed, including the hydrodynamics design and the mechanical structure design. Besides, an up-to-date review and the newest achievements of marine TCT technologies with their developing histories are further explored. Included are also reviews on the numerical models used to assess the performance of TCT and optimization methods applied to design the hydrofoils. This in turn significantly contributes to a better knowledge on the recent designs of TCT hydrofoils for the researchers working in the marine turbine energy domain. Such information could also have important implications in the design of more sophisticated hydrofoils for the exploitation in diverse tidal current energy technologies for reaching a sustainable future.

Introduction

The development of marine renewable energies represents a major opportunity and an attractive alternative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [1]. The oceans provide a massive source of potential energy resources in the form of fluid flow, thermal gradient, surface waves, and salinity gradients [2]. Extracting energy from tides is not recently developed. There are two systems for harnessing tidal energy which are the kinetic energy of the flowing fluids and the potential energy of the rising water [3]. Tidal current turbine (TCT) is used to recover this energy to overcome the rising energy demand while decreasing the impact on the hydrological ecology [4]. The success of employing tidal turbines to exploit the tidal currents is reliant on predicting their hydrodynamic performance. Several global investigations have confirmed that marine current energy has great potential as a regular, and predictable and clean energy source for power generation, with fewer harmful influences on the environment opposed to tidal barrages [5,6]. In general, three technologies are utilized to convert tidal currents into mechanical energy to produce electricity: horizontal axis turbines, oscillating hydrofoils, and vertical axis turbines [7]. These technologies can be established on the sea bottom, on the surface, or in between. Among these technologies, the horizontal axis turbines are the more developed one and can be utilized to obtain a large quantity of energy from marine currents [8]. Systems for studying the physical and operational parameters of the turbines are required to be installed to upgrade their execution. These advancements are invaluable when contrasted with wind turbine because of negligible infrastructural investment, diminished natural effects and sound issues [9]. The power generation that can be exploited with tidal current technologies is assessed to be around 75 GW worldwide, 11 GW in Europe especially in UK (6 GW) and France (3.4 GW) [10]. Numerous researches have been carried out on TCT in recent years but these studies are still in the experimental phase in diverse sites: European Marine Energy Center (EMEC), Scotland [11], the Marine Energy Research Center in Canada [12], and the experimental site of Paimpol in France [13]; Only prototypes had been tested till now that includes two-bladed SeaGen project turbines manufactured in the UK [14]. Most of the prototypes that exist so far showed that the designers of the tidal turbines had tried to rely on technology that is already devoted to the wind because of the similarity in working principle. For further information about the projects of renewable marine energies, in particular, tidal and wave energy in the world between 2015 and 2022 including project proponent, technology, location and capacity (MW), the reader is referred to the report [15].

In a recent survey, some researchers [[16], [17], [18], [19], [20]] had listed the companies that have started establishing tidal current turbine farms such as Andritz Hydro Hammerfest (AHH) in Anglesey (Wales, UK), Sabella in France, GE & Alstom Energy (France), MeyGen in Scotland, GE & Alstom Energy, and DCNS, EDF (France & Canada) which will start working in following years. These pre-commercial TCT projects account for the industrial solution in the future years and can be verified from the websites of these enterprises with up to date commercial news about the advancement in TCT technologies. For example, the EMEC was set up with the goal to test and improve marine renewable energy systems and is functioning from 2005 [21].

The MeyGen project is presently the largest arranged tidal stream project on the planet, and the principal business multi-turbine cluster to initiate development of this energy system [22]. On the other hand, established in 2016 with European Union funding, the FloTEC project is aimed to demonstrate the potential of floating tidal systems to generate predictable, low-cost, reliable, and low-risk energy for European electricity grid (Fig. 1). In order to achieve this goal, the SR2000 turbine has been launched which is considered to be the most powerful tidal turbine in the world [23]. In its first year of testing in the Orkney Islands, the 2 MW turbines generated more than 3 GWh of renewable energy which was higher than that generated by all Scottish tidal energy and wave fields during combined 12 years before the launch of the SR2000 in 2016. The energy generated by the SR2000 during one year of full-time operation is sufficient to meet the annual electricity need of approximately 830 UK homes. In addition, it has also satisfied more than a quarter of the electricity needs of the Orkney Islands at that time. Moreover, the design of SR2000 turbine features some innovations such as a 50% higher energy recovery rate due to larger rotors running at a lower nominal velocity, high-efficiency blades and mooring load dampers. The SR2000 is also compatible with the local infrastructure, and offers full access to all of its systems through optimized configuration of its platform [24]. Nowadays, this project is collecting environmental data to provide information regarding its application to reach more than 10 MW of installed capacity for the first period.

In general, TCT converts the kinetic energy of free-flowing water into electric energy which shows that the blades play an essential role to enhance the turbine output and furnish enough strength to the blade structure, it is very important to design the hydrofoils correctly. Accordingly, in this paper, we aim to explore the recent advancements in TCT with an emphasis on the current design considerations essential for the hydrofoils used in the tidal current turbine industry. Included are also reviews on the published numerical work on the designs of hydrofoils for effective blade designs to eventually achieve good turbine performance. What is more, detailed discussions on the two main groups of numerical models used to evaluate the performance of tidal turbines, namely, blade element momentum model and computational fluid dynamics are also provided.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview over the current state-of-research of tidal current turbine technologies and the recent design of hydrofoils. The factor affecting TCTs and design requirement of hydrofoil for TCTs are explored in Section 3. Section 4 exposes a comprehensive review on the numerical models employed in TCTs including the hydrodynamic and structural models that are essential for evaluating the TCTs performance. In section 5, one discusses and summarizes what was presented in the previous sections. We conclude by summary and final remarks in Section 6.

A schematic diagram synthesizing the different aspects of the article is given below.

Section snippets

State of the art in TCT technologies and hydrofoil designs

In this section, one exposes the latest achievements of the tidal current turbine technologies with their developing histories. Subsequently, the recent developments in the design of hydrofoils for tidal Current turbine are presented.

Design requirements and factor affecting the TCTs

The design of the hydrofoils of TCT is an encompassing work, which consists of the hydrodynamic design and mechanical structural design. This section aims at highlighting on these issues in conjunction with the existing literature and current trends. Besides, this section will mainly focus on the horizontal axis TCT blade conception because it has gained widespread use in marine current energy.

Numerical models of tidal turbines

In fact, a much money and time can be saved through using the numerical modeling approaches of tidal turbine rather than experimentation of the prototypes in the waters. Although numerical models cannot truly mimic complex offshore conditions, they are very convenient not only because of lower costs, but also for the possibility of collecting accurate and repeatable data. Furthermore, the key advantage that can be provided by the numerical simulation is the lower risk; despite there is

Summary and discussion

From the above discussions it is clear that technology, hydrofoil, design consideration and numerical optimization approaches play a very important role in optimal design and successful implementation of the TCTs system. Tidal current turbine hydrofoil design can be divided into two very distinct interdependent domains. The first is its hydrodynamic design, whilst the other is its structural design. The objective of the hydrodynamics design is to achieve a preferred external profile of the

Conclusion

This paper is focused on the recent advancements in the design of a hydrofoil for the horizontal axis tidal current turbine (HATCTs). An up-to-date review and the newest achievements of marine TCTs technologies with their developing histories are presented. Thereafter, the requirements and specifications essential for the design HATCTs hydrofoil including the hydrodynamics design and the structural design are illustrated. Followed successively by a comprehensive review of the numerical models

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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