Using Experimentally Validated Navier-Stokes CFD to Minimize Tidal Stream Turbine Power Losses Due to Wake/Turbine Interactions

Federico Attene, Francesco Balduzzi, Alessandro Bianchini and M. Sergio Campobasso
Additional contact information
Federico Attene: Engineering Department, Lancaster University, Gillow Avenue, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK
Francesco Balduzzi: Department of Industrial Engineering, Università Degli Studi di Firenze, Via di Santa Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy
Alessandro Bianchini: Department of Industrial Engineering, Università Degli Studi di Firenze, Via di Santa Marta 3, 50139 Firenze, Italy
M. Sergio Campobasso: Engineering Department, Lancaster University, Gillow Avenue, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 21, 1-26

Abstract: Tidal stream turbines fixed on the seabed can harness the power of tides at locations where the bathymetry and/or coastal geography result in high kinetic energy levels of the flood and/or neap currents. In large turbine arrays, however, avoiding interactions between upstream turbine wakes and downstream turbine rotors may be hard or impossible, and, therefore, tidal array layouts have to be designed to minimize the power losses caused by these interactions. For the first time, using Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics simulations which model the turbines with generalized actuator disks, two sets of flume tank experiments of an isolated turbine and arrays of up to four turbines are analyzed in a thorough and comprehensive fashion to investigate these interactions and the power losses they induce. Very good agreement of simulations and experiments is found in most cases. The key novel finding of this study is the evidence that the flow acceleration between the wakes of two adjacent turbines can be exploited not only to increase the kinetic energy available to a turbine working further downstream in the accelerated flow corridor, but also to reduce the power losses of said turbine due to its rotor interaction with the wake produced by a fourth turbine further upstream. By making use of periodic array simulations, it is also found that there exists an optimal lateral spacing of the two adjacent turbines, which maximizes the power of the downstream turbine with respect to when the two adjacent turbines are absent or further apart. This is accomplished by trading off the amount of flow acceleration between the wakes of the lateral turbines, and the losses due to shear and mixing of the front turbine wake and the wakes of the two lateral turbines.

Keywords: tidal stream energy; tidal turbine layout; turbine wake analysis; wake/turbine interaction; Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics; virtual blade model; flume tank model turbine measurements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/21/8768/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/21/8768/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:21:p:8768-:d:432851

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().