Transient Calculation of Impulse Turbine for Oscillating Water Column Wave Energy Convertor

Abstract

The transient calculation method for performance prediction of OWC impulse turbine is proposed in the present paper, which is supposed to provide more valuable unsteady information during self-starting and rotating of the turbine. The rotation of turbine are derived from the angular acceleration , which are obtained from torques integration on rotor blades. The frictions and electricity generator loading are regarded as the counteractive force contributing to the above torque calculations. The geometry generation and computation are all accomplished in Fluent 6.3 and Gambit 2.2. The sliding mesh and User Defined Function are employed in the above CFD code. The numerical results are compared and validated by the corresponding experimental and steady calculating data. The starting characteristics under various incident air flow conditions are investigated using the proposed numerical method