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.