NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF HYDRODYNAMIC PERFORMANCE OF FX-83-W HYDROFOIL CURRENT TURBINE

Ocean current flow characteristics are relatively stable and predictable, current turbine absorbs the energy of the ocean currents by the blades with a relative stable and lower angular velocity which indicates the capacity of current turbine greater than the onshore wind turbine. In this paper, the CFD method is utilized to calculate and analyze the working principle of FX-83-W current turbine. The three-dimensional coordinate of FX-83-W Hydrofoil blade surface have been calculated by MATLAB code, and 3D model has been established in Gambit. The basic control equations of CFD and its numerical solution are described, Reynolds Averaged N-S equations is used, and the realizable k-epsilon turbulence model is introduced to solve the Reynolds stress in the RANS equation. The numerical algorithm is the finite volume method (FVM), and the numerical simulation of CFD is used to study the open water performance, leading to thrust coefficient KT and torque coefficient KQ of FX-83-W Hydrofoil. The hydrodynamic thrust and hydrodynamic power of the ocean current turbine under different sea conditions have been obtained by numerical simulation.