• 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.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.590-593
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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. This paper introduces the experiment of rotor performance and also the effect of design parameter on the performance of HAT rotor by CFD.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.142-149
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• 2012

This study deals with the investigation of the scale effect for the vertical-axis tidal stream turbine by evaluating the hydrodynamic efficiency of turbine rotors of different diameters at different flow conditions. Numerical analyses are made for the turbine rotors with a same shape, but different sizes obtained using the diameter evaluation equation suggested in this paper. It is shown that the performance of turbine is clearly dependent upon the rotor size and inflow velocity, i.e. Reynolds number dependency of different-scaled turbines showing better efficiency with increasing Reynolds number. The sudden decrease of efficiency is also noticed around the transition region of Reynolds number. The hydrodynamic capacity evaluation method needed at initial stage of turbine design is suggested and exercised with some test cases. It is recommended that the method is expected to be useful for turbines with demanding powers between 10 kW and 300 kW.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.114-120
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• 2011

The characteristics of a helical turbine to be used for tidal stream energy conversion have been numerically studied with varying a few design parameters. The helical turbines were proposed aiming at mitgating the well known poor cut-in characteristics and the structural vibration caused by the fluctuating torque, and the basic concept is introducing some twisting angle of the vertical blade along the rotation axis of the turbine. Among many potential controling parameters, we focused, in this paper, on the twisting angle and the height to diameter ratio of the turbine, and, based on the numerical experiment, We tried to propose a configuration of such turbine for which better performance can be expected. The three-dimensional unsteady RANS equations were solved by using the commercial CFD software, FLUENT with k-${\omega}$ SST turbulence model, and the grid was generated by GAMBIT. It is shown that there are a range of the twisting angle producing better efficiency with less vibration and the minimum height to diameter ratio above which the efficiency does not improve considerably.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.198-205
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of the grain size distribution and organic matters to understand the current status of the tidal flat sediment for efficient management of Suncheon Bay. We investigated the characteristics of the surface sediments in the mouth area of the Suncheon Bay at fifteen stations in April and July, 2009. Specific conclusions were as follows. The sediments in the most part of tidal flat was shown as muddy facies(clay and silt contents was more than 90%), whereas in the tidal river affected by water flow from the Dongstream was shown as sandy facies. The analyzed values of the tidal flat sediment were in the range of $1.9{\sim}3.8{\phi}$(mean $2.5{\phi}$) for sorting, and -1.5~3.2(mean -0.3) for skewness, and 1.5~14.1(mean 3.9) for kurtosis. So we knew that the tidal flat sediments in the Suncheon Bay was mainly composed by fine-grained sediment. Erosion was happened in the tidal river, whereas sedimentation was occurred in the tidal flat. The most of organic matters was derived from the Dongstream. Total organic matters shown as ignition loss was 5.75%, COD and $H_2S$ values were lower than the eutrophication level(COD; 20.0 mg/g dry, $H_2S$; 0.2 mg S/g dry). From our research the tidal flat of the Suncheon Bay is relatively fine, but a part of the flat was exceed the environmental standard. So we have to establish effective countermeasures to reduce the organic matters and nutrients derived from stream for environmental preservation of the Suncheon bay and conduct scientifically sustainable monitering for streams flowing into Suncheon Bay and tidal flat.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.241-248
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• 2010

This paper deals with the performance analysis and design of the Darrieus-type vertical axis turbine to evaluate the effect of key design parameters such as number of blade, blade chord, pitch and camber. The commercial CFD software FLUENT was employed as an unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver with k-e turbulent model. Grid system was modelled by GAMBIT. Basic numerical methodology of the present study is appeared in Jung et al. (2009). Two-dimensional analysis was mostly adopted to avoid the barrier of massive calculation required for parametric study. It was found that the highly efficient turbine model could be designed through the optimization of design parametrrs.