Analysis of Flow through Ocean Energy Harvesting Bidirectional Impulse Turbine

Abstract

Oscillating water column based wave energy device uses bi-directional flow impulse turbine. In this paper, a computational analysis of an impulse turbine has been performed using Ansys-CFX 14.0 code. Initially, a CAD model was prepared and unstructured meshing strategy was implemented in the flow domain. Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations were solved to analyse the fluid flow properties. The efficiency, torque coefficient and input coefficient were compared for the evaluations. The flow features through the turbine shows that the flow separation occurs near the trailing edge of the suction surface of the blade.