Abstract
Clean and renewable energy technologies using ocean energy give us non-polluting alternatives to fossil and nuclear-fueled power plants to meet establishment of countermeasures against the global warming and growing demand for electrical energy. Among the ocean energy resources, wave power takes a growing interest because of its enormous amount of potential energy in the world. Therefore, various types of wave power conversion system to capture the energy of ocean waves have been developed. However, suitable turbine type is not normalized yet because of relatively low efficiency of the turbine systems. The purpose of this study is to investigate the internal flow and performance characteristics of a cross-flow type hydro turbine, which will be built in a caisson for wave power generation. Numerical simulation using a commercial CFD code is conducted to clarify the effects of the turbine rotation speed and flow rate variation on the turbine characteristics. The results show that the output power of the cross-flow type hydro turbine with symmetric nozzle shape is obtained mainly from Stage 2. Turbine inlet configuration should be designed to obtain large amount of flow rate because the static pressure and absolute tangential velocity are influenced considerably by inlet flow rate.
