Unsteady hydrodynamics of tidal turbine blades

Modelling a Tidal Turbine in Unsteady Flow

A brief review of the literature is provided on the characteristics of marine currents and the approaches used for simulating tidal turbines. The feasibility of using CFD models to simulate time-dependent turbulent flow around a tidal turbine is then explored. Two different approaches for specifying the structure of the turbulent inflow conditions in CFD models are compared: the von Kármán spec...

Evaluation of the durability of composite tidal turbine blades.

The long-term reliability of tidal turbines is critical if these structures are to be cost effective. Optimized design requires a combination of material durability models and structural analyses. Composites are a natural choice for turbine blades, but there are few data available to predict material behaviour under coupled environmental and cycling loading. The present study addresses this pro...

Development of High Performance Composite Bend-twist Coupled Blades for a Horizontal Axis Tidal Turbine

An adaptive textile composite, sometimes referred to as a smart material or intelligent material, is a structure tailored to exhibit desirable elastic deformation behaviour not necessarily proportional to the imposed load. An example of such a structure would be a box beam so tailored that an imposed cantilever load results in twisting as well as bending, although no torsional load was imposed,...

Performance Prediction of a Free Stream Tidal Turbine with Composite Bend-Twist Coupled Blades

Free stream tidal turbines are a source of growing interest in the marine renewable energy field. Some designs that use an actuated mechanism to control individual blade pitch, as the tidal current varies and even during a revolutionary cycle, face the challenge of ensuring high reliability under the loads imposed on the device in the harsh sub sea environment. Adaptive materials have been used...

Optimum Shape Design of Turbine Blades?