Unsteady effects of a winglet on the performance of horizontal-axis tidal turbine

Dahai Zhang, Di Liu, Xiaodong Liu, Haiyang Xu, Yuankui Wang, Ran Bi and Peng Qian

Renewable Energy, 2024, vol. 225, issue C

Abstract: A tip winglet can reduce the induced drag and the load fluctuation of a blade, considerably improving the hydrodynamic performance of a tidal turbine. Up to now, there are fewer studies on the unsteady effects of winglets, which limits the application of this design scheme. In this paper, a tidal turbine model is established based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and verified by a flume experiment. Then, unsteady effects on the turbine blade are analyzed considering different winglet lengths and cant angles. According to the study, the blade performance is optimal when the winglet cant angle is 45°, with about 11% efficiency improvement and about 8% increase in axial force; as the winglet length increases, the performance tends to further improve. In addition, this study demonstrates that the reason why a winglet can reduce blade load fluctuations is that the winglet takes the tip vortex generation position away from the blade rotation plane, instead of reducing the tip vortex intensity.

Keywords: Winglet; Tidal turbine; Unsteady effects; Tidal current energy; Computational fluid dynamics; Flume experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148124003999
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:225:y:2024:i:c:s0960148124003999

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2024.120334

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().