Oscillating hydrofoils play a crucial role in tidal energy conversion systems, with their structural design exerting a profound influence on the hydrodynamic efficiency and overall performance of these devices. Inspired by the morphology of fish caudal fins, this study designs four biomimetic hydrofoils with diverse structural configurations to investigate their hydrodynamic performance: leading edge swept-back, trailing edge swept-forward, swept-back, and swept-forward. Computational fluid dynamics simulations are utilized to systematically analyze the impacts of sweep angles, pitch axis locations, heave amplitudes, and pitch angles on the hydrodynamic performance of these hydrofoil configurations. The results indicate that increasing the sweep angle significantly improves the lift-to-drag ratio of the hydrofoil, with the drag coefficient of the trailing-edge swept-forward configuration reduced by 12% as the sweep angle increases from 5° to 35°. Power output can be enhanced by adjusting the pitch axis location toward the mid-chord. Increasing the heave amplitude improves the lift-to-drag ratio but reduces the average power. At a pitch amplitude of 75°, the growth rate of the lift coefficient slows down, while that of the drag coefficient remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the average power coefficient reaches its maximum. This study contributes to the understanding of efficient hydrofoil design and highlights the importance of incorporating coupled motion parameters in computational models to better capture hydrofoil dynamics in future research.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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