A large-eddy simulation study of horizontal axis tidal turbine in different inflow conditions

In this paper, we present our recent work of numerical simulations of the horizontal axis tidal turbine, which combines the large eddy simulation with the actuator line method. The towing tank test is conducted to acquire the performance of an originally designed tidal turbine. We first validated our numerical model with the experimental data; in this case, a good agreement was obtained with the simple uniform flow. In addition, we used different inflow conditions in the simulations to investigate the impacts on the turbine wake. The results show that the structure and mixing rates of turbine wake were different for various inflow conditions. For turbulent inflow conditions, the turbine wake was asymmetric and mixes rapidly downstream of the turbine. The tip and root vortices can maintain stability for only a 1–2 blade radii distance. Furthermore, the preliminary results of the different turbulent intensities and the effect of the incident angle are presented.