While wind farms have no inherent storage to supply power in calm conditions, this paper demonstrates that large tidal turbine farms in channels have short-term energy storage. This storage lies in the inertia of the oscillating flow and can be used to exceed the previously published upper limit for power production by currents in a tidal channel, while simultaneously maintaining stronger curre...

There is an upper bound to the amount of power that can be generated by turbines in tidal channels as too many turbines merely block the flow. One condition for achievement of the upper bound is that the turbines are deployed uniformly across the channel, with all the flow through them, but this may interfere with other uses of the channel. An isolated turbine is more effective in a channel tha...

As renewable generation has become less expensive during recent decades, and it becomes more accepted by the global population, the focus on renewable generation has expanded to include new types with promising future applications, such as river and tidal generation. The input variations to these types of resources are slower but also steadier than wind or solar generation. The level of water t...

The present paper reports measurements carried out in a centrifugal compressor equipped with double row of low solidity partial vane diffuser. Performance of the compressor is measured with three sets of double row diffusers with different radial spacing between the diffusers. From these measurements best configurations are identified and static pressures on the diffuser walls and probe measure...

To improve the operational reliability of renewable energy conversion system, high-performance polymers and engineering plastics are used to make some parts and components of the energy conversion device, especially in the marine renewable energy generation field. In this article, special plastic bearings based on the material of polyoxymethylene (POM) were designed and applied in the power gen...

Hydrodynamic modelling is an important tool for the development of tidal stream energy projects. Many hydrodynamic models incorporate the effect of tidal turbines through an enhanced bottom drag. In this paper we show that although for coarse grid resolutions (kilometre scale) the resulting force exerted on the flow agrees well with the theoretical value, the force starts decreasing with decrea...

Laboratory testing of tidal turbine models is an essential tool to investigate hydrodynamic interactions between turbines and the flow. Such tests can be used to calibrate numerical models and to estimate rotor loading and wake development to inform the design of full scale machines and array layout. The details of the design and manufacturing techniques used to develop a highly instrumented tu...

Extensive Research and Development (R&D) within the tidal energy industry is pushing this sector towards commercial viability, with full scale prototypes starting to meet the challenges of the marine environment. This paper combines velocity data collected from Ramsey Sound (Pembrokeshire, Wales), with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to assess the impact of non-rectilinear flows on turbine r...

Interest in renewable, green, and sustainable energy has risen sharply in recent years. The use of marine turbines to extract kinetic energy from the tidal current is gaining popularity. CFD modeling is carried out to investigate the surrounding flow behavior and thus develop effective marine turbine systems. However, visualizing the simulation results remains a challenging task for engineers. ...