Computational study of hydrodynamic performance of vertical axis water turbines

Author

Sun, Yang ; Zhang, Liang

Author_Institution

Inst. of Ocean Renewable Energy Syst., Harbin Eng. Univ., Harbin, China

fYear

2012

fDate

25-27 July 2012

Firstpage

920

Lastpage

922

Abstract

Vertical axis water turbine (hereafter VAWT) is the common investigated equipment in tidal streams turbine generator system. In this paper, the flow fields around a VAWT were numerical simulated with emphasis on the hydrodynamic performance of VAWT. The simulations were undertaken with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT 6.2 using the sliding meshes controlled by user-defined functions (UDF). And the computational meshes were generated by GAMBIT 2.2 to achieve better mesh quality. The calculated results show that some obvious discrepancies exist in the hydrodynamic performance of VAWT operated in the flow fields of water channel and open water respectively.

Keywords

channel flow; computational fluid dynamics; flow simulation; hydrodynamics; mechanical engineering computing; mesh generation; turbines; CFD; FLUENT 6.2 software; GAMBIT 2.2 software; VAWT; computational fluid dynamics; computational mesh; flow field numerical simulation; hydrodynamic performance; mesh quality; open water; sliding mesh; tidal streams turbine generator system; user-defined function; vertical axis water turbines; water channel; Azimuth; Blades; Force; Hydrodynamics; Rotors; Shafts; Turbines; UDF; VAWT; hydrodynamic performance; numerical simulation; sliding mesh; wall interference;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Industrial Informatics (INDIN), 2012 10th IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0312-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/INDIN.2012.6301197

Filename

6301197