Numerical Modeling of a Darrieus Horizontal Axis Shallow-Water Turbine
Publication: Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 5
Abstract
For decades, Darrieus turbines have shown their advantage over other turbines for providing hydropower. Most studies tend to be conducted with the turbine in its vertical axis configuration, while few have examined the horizontal axis configuration. In this paper, we undertake a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis that investigates blade profile alternatives to improve the efficiency of a horizontal axis Darrieus turbine under more natural flow conditions. An inlet boundary layer profile and a confined domain are imposed to represent river conditions. Four blade profiles are tested under various tip-speed ratios using a three-bladed turbine. The developed model is based on an unsteady shear stress transport (SST) turbulence closure associated with a very-fine-grid mesh. The model methods are first validated against open-channel experimental results published in the literature and show less than 13% discrepancy. The S1046 blade profile is shown to improve the power coefficient by 14% compared to the NACA0018 blade profile. The S809 blade profile exhibits the lowest performance in the dynamic stall and transition regions. For high tip-speed ratios, the FXLV152 profile produces the highest local efficiency power coefficient. The influence of the blade number is also quantified. The four- and two-bladed S1046 configurations achieve the highest power coefficients in the low and high tip-speed ratio regions, respectively.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions (CFX case and results files, mesh files) associated with a commercialized product.
Acknowledgments
All calculations were done using the computational resources of the Compute Canada network, which is here gratefully acknowledged. The authors would also like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for its financial support (Grant No. 514264-17 with the company IdÉnergie).
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Published In
Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 5 • October 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 6, 2019
Accepted: Jun 9, 2020
Published online: Jul 29, 2020
Published in print: Oct 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Dec 29, 2020
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