Design of a River Hydrokinetic Turbine Using Optimization and CFD Simulations

Hydrokinetic turbines have gained importance due to rapid developments in the field of renewable energy. There are several applications for large-scale hydrokinetic turbines in marine environments; however, the number of small-scale designs for rivers and channels is limited. In the present study, a fixed-speed, stall-regulated riverine hydrokinetic turbine rotor has been designed through an optimization process and simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis methods. The blades and rotor were optimized by genetic algorithm methods. Simulations were conducted using commercially available software with a shear-stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence closure model. In the simulations, the performance in terms of power, torque, and thrust were found to be in good agreement with the optimization parameters. The optimized hydrokinetic turbine is named TIGRIS-27 H, and is a three-bladed horizontal-axis energy converter rotating at 45 revolutions per minute (rpm) and generating up to 27 kW power at the rated velocity of 2.7 ms−1 with an average power coefficient of 0.43.