Hydrokinetic Energy: Turbine technologies and Array Deployment Optimization through CFD

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This five-year research program aims at supporting the development of the emerging sector of renewable energy based on in-stream water turbines. Through extensive CFD simulations with experimental validation, we plan to analyze and improve the performances of turbine designs and to provide guidelines for the optimal deployment of arrays of turbines in either tidal or river currents. Doing so, we will also contribute to improve our fundamental understanding of several challenging and critical issues such as turbine wake recovery mechanisms and the impact of upstream turbulence or turbine ducts on those mechanisms.Our research achievements over the past six years have paved the way for this ambitious program structured around two main topics, namely, Hydrokinetic turbine technologies, and Array deployment optimization, divided respectively in three and four research projects.In particular, we plan to continue the development and optimization of two cross-flow turbine concepts, namely the oscillating-foils hydrokinetic turbine and the vertical-axis turbine technology. Both types are characterized by a rectangular harvesting plane and favorable wake recovery mechanisms which make them more promising designs than rotating blades axial-flow turbines. The impact of blade end-plates, of duct and diffuser enhancers and of turbine supporting structure will be investigated, among other things, with our state-of-the-art numerical simulation tools. Experimental validations on small-scale prototypes are also planned thanks to our collaborators at University of Victoria and at the national laboratory NRC/OCRE in Ottawa. At the scale of the turbines farm, to keep the computing demands realistic, one requires a simplified turbine modelling approach to reliably take into account the presence and interactions of the turbines in a three-dimensional numerical model of the water resource (tidal channel or river, free-surface, bathymetry). The simplified turbine modeling approach we propose shall be accurate in terms of power extraction and turbulent wake signature of each turbine, in addition of being robust enough to operate in perturbed flow conditions and flexible enough to incorporate the effect of duct, diffuser enhancer and turbine structure if necessary. Reliable reference databases needed to develop and compare the simplified model will be generated with massive, high-fidelity CFD simulations (3D DDES) thanks to the supercomputing resources of Compute Canada.This research program will permit to train at least 13 students in this rapidly growing sector of renewable energy with highly sought skills in state-of-the-art CFD and high-performance computing (HPC). This program is likely to have a true positive impact in Canada by helping to diversify its clean energy sources and by helping shape a new industry sector with coveted high-tech jobs and great exporting potentials.