• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.105-111
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• 2010

The present study deals with the investigation about the improvement of the design of tidal stream turbine blade (HAT) in comparison with wind turbine blade because the parameters of tidal stream turbine blade has been mostly derived from wind turbines. As such, there is plenty of room for improvement of the HAT impeller blade design. Comparisons have been done between the newly designed and existing impeller computationally. Similar comparisons will also be made for the experimental results in the near future.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.36-40
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• 2010

Tidal current power system is the energy converter which converts the kinetic energy of tidal stream into electric energy. The performance of the rotor which initially converts the energy is determined by various design factors and it should be optimized by the ocean environment of the field. Flow direction changes due to rise and fall of the tides, but horizontal axis turbine is very sensitive to direction of flow. To investigate the rotor performance considering the interaction problems with incidence angle of flow, series of experiments have been conducted. The results and findings are summarized in the paper.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.75-82
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• 2011

Marine current energy is one of the most interesting renewable and clean energy resources that have been less exploited. Especially, Korea has worldwide outstanding tidal current energy resources and it is highly required to develop tidal in-stream energy conversion system in coastal area. The objective of study is to investigate harnessing techniques of tidal current energy and to design the a 100 kW horizontal axis tidal turbine using blade element momentum theory with Prandtl's tip loss factor for optimal design procedures. In addition, Influence of Prandtl's tip loss factor at local blade positions as a function of tip speed ratio was studied, and the analysed results showed that power coefficient of designed rotor blade using NACA 63812 was 0.49 at rated tip speed ratio.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.85-92
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• 2013

Many efforts will have to be made on securing the stable supply of the energy due to the worldwide trend of controlling the utilization fossil fuels inducing global climate change. Renewable portfolio standard enforced to power companies over 500 MW capacity from 2012. Tidal current energy is one of the most interesting renewable and clean energy resources that have been less exploited. Especially, Korea has worldwide outstanding tidal current energy resources and it is highly required to develop a tidal current energy conversion system(TECS) in coastal region. So, we examine a tidal in-stream energy using a numerical model and estimate a tidal current potential for commercialization of tidal current power plant in the sea of the Bunamgun-do. Available tidal energy resources is also analytically estimated using a tidal farm method and the annual energy production of an optimal TECS arrays will be calculated with taking into account interference of lateral and longitudinal spacing.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.263-269
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• 2010

The present study deals with the investigation about the improvement of performance of tidal stream turbine blade (HAT) with tip rake. HAT impeller has sometimes experienced noise and vibration by Tip vortex which causes even erosion and severe efficiency loss to the blade, The newly proposed tip rake impeller can make the tip vortex week compared with a normal impeller by preventing the three dimensional effect at tip region. In order to find out the optimum rake impeller, three cases have been designed and the performance of the designed rake impellers has been validated by the commercial CFD code(Fluent). The efficiency of optimized rake impeller was up to 4.6% higher than the conventional impeller. The more parametric study for high efficiency and good cavitation performance is expected to be conducted in a near future.

• New & Renewable Energy
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.3-8
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• 2009

Tidal current power system is one of ocean renewable energies that can minimize the environmental impact with many advantages compared to other energy sources. Not like others, the produced energy can be precisely predicted without weather conditions and also the operation rate is very high. To convert the current into power, the first device encountered to the incoming flow is the rotor that can transform into rotational energy. The performance of rotor can be determined by various design parameters including numbers of blade, sectional shape, diameter, and etc. The stream lines near the rotating rotor is very complex and the interference effects around the system is also difficult to predict. The paper introduces the experiment of rotor performance and also the fundamental study on the characteristics of three different rotors and flow near the rotor by CFD.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.154-164
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• 2019

A rotor dynamic analysis is mandatory for stability and design optimization of submerged propellers and turbines. An accurate simulation requires a proper consideration of fluid-induced reaction forces. This paper presents a bi-directional coupling of a bond graph method solver and an unsteady vortex lattice method solver where the former is used to model the rotor dynamics of the power train and the latter is used to predict transient hydrodynamic forces. Due to solver coupling, determination of hydrodynamic coefficients is obsolete and added mass effects are considered automatically. Additionally, power grid and structural faults like grid fluctuations, eccentricity or failure could be investigated using the same model. In this research work a fast, time resolved dynamic simulation of the complete power train is conducted. As an example, the rotor dynamics of a tidal stream turbine is investigated under two inflow conditions: I - shear flow, II - shear flow + water waves.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.103-115
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• 2010

Currently, many nations in the world make a strong effort to exploit the new and renewable energy. Tidal energy is the constant and regular power sources with higher and more stable quality compared to other renewable sources. The present paper reports the status of tidal energy analyzing its latest technology and development. In addition, a feasibility study on two types of tidal power plant(TPP) systems is conducted based on many assumptions, conditions and data involved in the Korea environment. The Sihwa and Uldolmok TPP are considered as the reference of tidal barrage(TB) and tidal in stream energy conversion(TISEC) type, respectively. While TB technology is currently mature and reliable, there still remain many environmental issues. Whereas, TISEC is recently received more attention due to its environmental friendly aspect. Therefore, the TISEC is believed to be very promising technology as the TPP. The unit electricity generation cost of Sihwa TPP is approximately 67.3 KRW/kWh. However, considering additional cost of Sihwa lake construction, it increases to 254 KRW/kWh. In Uldolmok, the unit electricity generation cost is calculated to be about 400 KRW/kWh, which is even higher than that of Sihwa TPP. This is ascribed to high cost of TISEC device and construction cost due to its technological infancy as well as relatively small power capacity. Nevertheless, the TISEC technology would be substantially developed in the future due to its many advantageous features.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.241-255
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• 2012

Three types of 100 kW-class tidal stream turbines are proposed and their performance is studied both numerically and experimentally. Following a wind turbine design procedure, a base blade is derived and two additional blades are newly designed focusing more on efficiency and cavitation. For the three designed turbines, a CFD is performed by using FLUENT. The calculations predict that the newly designed turbines perform better than the base turbine and the tip vortex can be reduced with additional efficiency increase by adopting a tip rake. The performance of the turbines is tested in a towing tank with 700 mm models. The scale problem is carefully investigated and the measurements are compared with the CFD results. All the prediction from the CFD is supported by the model experiment with some quantitative discrepancy. The maximum efficiencies are 0.49 (CFD) and 0.45 (experiment) at TSR 5.17 for the turbine with a tip rake.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.151-158
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• 2016

Tidal farm is a multi-arrayed turbine system for utilizing tidal stream energy. For horizontal-axis turbine(HAT) system, it is recommended that each unit has to be deployed far apart in order to avoid hydrodynamic interference among turbines, as proposed by the European Marine Energy Centre(EMEC). But there is no rule for the arrangement of vertical-axis turbine(VAT) yet. Moreover it has been reported that a proper arrangement of adjacent turbines can enhance the overall efficiency even greater than an arrangement without mutual interference effect. This paper suggests the layout of VATs showing the better performances, which turned out to be quite different from HATs' arrangement. Numerical calculations were performed to investigate the performance variation in terms of the rotational direction as well as the distance between turbines. It has been shown that the best combination of rotational direction and distance between turbines can increase its performance higher about 9.2% than that of two independently operated turbines. It is likely that such improvement is due to the increased velocity between adjacent turbines. For diagonally arranged turbines, the maximum normalized mean power coefficient was obtained to be higher about 5.6% than that of two independent turbines. It is expected that the present results can be utilized for conceptual design of tidal farm to harness the tidal stream energy.