Wake characteristics of a TriFrame of axial-flow hydrokinetic turbines

RENEWABLE ENERGY

卷:109

Article

Chawdhary, Saurabh¹  Hill, Craig²  Yang, Xiaolei³  Guala, Michele¹  Corren, Dean⁴  Colby, Jonathan⁴  Sotiropoulos, Fotis³ 

[1] Univ Minnesota, St Anthony Falls Lab, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA

[2] Univ Washington, Dept Mech Engn, Seattle, WA 98195 USA

[3] SUNY Stony Brook, Dept Civil Engn, Coll Engn & Appl Sci, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA

[4] Verdant Power Inc, 888 Main St, New York, NY 10044 USA

关键词: Hydrokinetic;    Marine;    Turbine;    Energy;    TriFrame;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.renene.2017.03.029

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

An effective way to develop arrays of hydrokinetic turbines in river and tidal channels is to arrange them in TriFrame (TM) (1) configurations where three turbines are mounted together at the apexes of a triangular frame. This TriFrame can serve as a building block for rapidly deploying multi-turbine arrays. The wake structure of a TriFrame of three model turbines is investigated using both numerical simulations and experiments. In the numerical part, we employ large-eddy simulation (LES) with the curvilinear immersed boundary method (CURVIB) for fully resolving the turbine geometry details to simulate intraturbine wake interactions in the TriFrame configuration. First, the computed results are compared with the experiments in terms of mean flow and turbulence characteristics with overall good agreement. The flow-fields are then analyzed to elucidate the mechanisms of turbine interactions and wake evolution in the TriFrame configuration. We found that the wake of the upstream TriFrame turbine exhibits unique characteristics indicating presence of the Venturi effect as the wake encounters the two downstream turbines. We finally compare the wakes of the TriFrame turbines with that of an isolated single turbine wake to further illustrate how the TriFrame configuration affects the wake characteristics and power production in an array of TriFrames. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free