Development and Analysis of a Bi-Directional Tidal Turbine

Abstract

The concept of using renewable energy for power generation has experienced much attention with increasing costs of non-renewable sources. The largest untapped renewable energy resource is in the form of the oceans and currents created by them. It has been proven that many different concepts and designs are possible for this use and this study will focus on a bi-directional turbine created for this purpose. In the present study, the commercial CFD software ANSYS CFX was utilized to build a turbine map. The basic turbine map was developed for a 25 blade bi-axial turbine under various flow conditions and the optimal efficiency for each flow condition was determined and a further analysis of the number of blades in the rotor was completed. The flow diagrams produced by the CFD analysis show that many improvements can still be made to the design in future iterations.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA561876

Entities

People

  • Jason K. Ponder

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Blade Tips
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Cross Flow
  • Directional
  • Efficiency
  • Energy
  • Engineering
  • Flow Rate
  • Fluid Flow
  • Geometry
  • Impulse Water Turbines
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Renewable Energy
  • Tidal Power
  • Tidal Turbines
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Combustion and Flow Dynamics.
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy Engineering.