Alternative sustainable technologies for energy production are currently receiving increased attention, one of them being hydrokinetic turbines. For some applications an augmentation of the turbine rotor through a diffuser is a reasonable option offering some advantages. In order to get a better understanding of diffuser augmented turbines an extensive literature study is performed also including relevant publications on ducted wind turbines. The published geometry and performance data are collected and reevaluated applying a new procedure, which references the turbine power on the diffuser outlet area instead of the rotor area. Additionally, geometries are generated, manually optimized and compared to the data gathered in literature. Dominant diffuser attributes are identified independent from the exact diffuser concept such as the shape of the diffuser close to the exit plane and the diffuser area ratio. By using the new evaluation approach a strong correlation between the area ratio and the overall turbine power coefficient is observed. Observations suggest that an increase of the exit area is only reasonable up to a certain limit. To a some extent, this constraint can be overcome through boundary layer control, e.g. by applying multi-stage diffuser concepts. The presented work gives a guide line for effective design of diffusers for hydrokinetic turbines and generally improves the understanding of the operating principle of diffuser augmented turbines.
Up to 6 Schottel Instream Turbines (SIT250) can be mounted on the tidal platform PLAT-I developed by Sustainable Marine Energy. Due to the close proximity of the turbines interactions can occur between them. Two horizontal axis tidal turbines in model scale are investigated experimentally and numerically to analyze these interactions. Experimental data were measured in a towing tank and consist of integral values for torque, thrust and rotational speed. Both a steady state and an unsteady three-dimensional Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) approach are utilized for simulating the turbine flow field. The first part of the paper compares simulation results of a single turbine at different tip speed ratios with measurements to validate the numerical approach and its employed models. The second part analyses the interaction between two turbines. The axial distance in main flow direction between the turbines is half the rotor diameter. The radial distance measured between the hubs of the turbines is varied in steps of 0.2 between 0.0 and 2.0 times the rotor diameter in the experiment and between 0.0 and 1.4 in the simulations. Measurements were conducted for tip speed ratios of 3, 4 and 5. In the simulations the tip speed ratio was fixed at 4. The used simulation domain replicates the actual width and height of the towing tank and a sufficient length up- and downstream of the turbines. The water surface is modeled with a free slip wall. Both thrust and torque are compared between simulation results and experimental data. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the results and flow field in the numerical simulations is presented and the interaction between the turbines is discussed.
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