Performance Analysis of Multi-Sectional Cycloidal Hydrokinetic Turbines

Abstract

Hydrokinetic power is the most efficient and reliable source of renewable energy and it has been utilized to produce power for centuries. The cycloidal water turbine is a subset of the H-bar type Darrieus turbines that are designed to actively controls the pitch angle of blades to improve turbine efficiency. However, the traditional cycloidal turbine has some shortcomings. For example, the torque and power coefficient vary significantly as the turbine rotates, which means the produced power is not uniform in one revolution. The associated hydrodynamic load will lead to fatigue of the turbine structure that will shorten the turbine lifespan. To solve this problem, a concept of the multi-sectional cycloidal water turbine is proposed. In the present study, computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations are applied to investigate the performance of the multi-sectional cycloidal turbine. A cycloidal turbine with three identical sections is designed. Each section consists of three blades and NACA0021 is chosen as the hydrofoil. Structured mesh with sliding interfaces is generated and arbitrary Mesh Interface (AMI) technique is employed. Unsteady RANS simulations with SST k–ω model are conducted to compute the flow field and torque generated by the turbine, and then power coefficient is computed. The results demonstrates that the three-section turbine has uniform performance in one revolution. At the design condition, the power coefficients of the one-section turbine and the three-section turbine are similar; when the TSR is much larger or less than the desired value, the three-section turbine has better performance.