Minimising turbine thrust variation in multi-rotor tidal fences

Journal article

Abstract:: Recent analysis of tidal stream energy devices has focussed on maximising power output. Studies have shown that significant performance enhancement can be achieved through the constructive interference effects that develop between tidal stream turbines by deploying them close together. However, this results in variation in the flow incident on the turbines and hence leads to thrust variation across the turbine fence. This may lead to varying damage rates across the fence with adverse impacts on operation and maintenance costs over the turbine lifetime. This study investigates strategies to reduce thrust variation across fences of tidal turbines using three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes simulations. It is shown that the variation in turbine thrust across a fence of eight turbines can be reduced to within 1% with minimal impact on the fence power. Furthermore, by reducing the rotational speed of inboard turbines, or varying the blade pitch angle of the turbines across the fence, it is possible to reduce overall turbine loads and increase the power to thrust ratio of the turbines.

Files:: Stephenson-Vogel2020_Article_MinimisingTurbineThrustVariati.pdf

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Publisher:: Springer
Journal:: Journal of Ocean Engineering and Marine Energy More from this journal
Volume:: 6
Pages:: 293-302
Publication date:: 2020-09-20
Acceptance date:: 2020-09-09
DOI:: 10.1007/s40722-020-00174-8
EISSN:: 2198-6452
ISSN:: 2198-6444

Copyright holder:: Stephenson and Vogel
Rights statement:: Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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