• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
• /
• 제39권2호
• /
• pp.143-151
• /
• 2015

Recently, tidal current energy conversion is a promising way to harness the power of tides in order to meet the growing demands of energy utilization. A new concept of tidal current energy conversion device, named Vane Tidal Turbine (VTT), is introduced in this study. VTT has several special features that are potentially more advantageous than the conventional tidal turbines, such as propeller type tidal turbines. The purpose of this study on VTT is to analyze the possibility of extracting the hydrokinetic energy of tidal current and converting it into electricity, and evaluate the performance of turbines for various numbers of blades (six, eight and twelve) using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). At various tip-speed ratios (TSR), the six-bladed turbine obtains the highest power and torque coefficients, power efficiency is up to 28% at TSR = 1.89. Otherwise, the twelve blade design captures the smallest portion of available tidal current energy at all TSRs. However, by adding more blades, torque extracted from the rotor shaft of twelve-bladed turbine is more uniform due to the less interrupted generation of force for a period of time (one revolution).

• 한국유체기계학회 논문집
• /
• 제18권1호
• /
• pp.51-58
• /
• 2015

This paper presents a study on Vane Tidal Turbine (VTT) focusing on analysis of two types of blade arrangement originated from the previous studies where the original design was examined and performance-tested for different numbers of blades (six, eight and twelve). Compared to conventional tidal turbines, VTT has several special features and potential advantages which have been being thoroughly developed. The purpose of this study is to analyze VTT's capability of extracting and converting the hydrokinetic energy of tidal currents into electricity at given arrangement of blades (single and double rows, six and twelve blades) using CFD. From the calculation results, the six-blade single row turbine shows the best performance, in which the highest power and torque coefficients reach up to about 34 % and 36 %, respectively, at TSR=0.94. However, despite of lower power coefficient, by adding more blades, the torque's extraction of twelve-blade turbine, especially the double row type, is less fluctuate than that of the six-blade setups.