Numerical Study on Air Turbines with Enhanced Techniques for OWC Wave Energy Conversion

In recent years, the oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converter, which can capture wave energy from the ocean, has been widely applied all over the world. As the essential part of the OWC system, the impulse and Wells turbines are capable of converting the low pressure pneumatic energy into the mechanical shaft power. As an enhanced technique, the design of endplate or ring attached to the blade tip is investigated numerically in this paper. 3D numerical models based on a CFD-software FLUENT 12.0 are established and validated by the corresponding experimental results from the reports of Setoguchi et al. (2004) and Takao et al. (2001). Then the flow fields and non-dimensional evaluating coefficients are calculated and analyzed under steady conditions. Results show that the efficiency of impulse turbine with ring can reach up to 0.49 when φ=1, which is 4% higher than that in the cases for the endplate-type and the original one. And the ring-type Wells turbine with fixed guide vanes shows the best performance with the maximal efficiency of 0.55, which is 22% higher than that of the original one. In addition, the quasi-steady analysis is used to calculate the mean efficiency and output-work of a wave cycle under sinusoidal flow condition. Taking all together, this study provides support for structural optimization of impulse turbine and Wells turbine in the future.