Efficiency improvement of a tidal current turbine utilizing a larger area of channel

There is a growing interest in utilizing tidal currents for power generation which has led to extensive research on this source of renewable energy. The amount of energy that can be extracted from tidal currents has been a topic of considerable interest to researchers for many years; still, there is no consensus on the extent to which this resource can be exploited. A turbine generates no power if it presents no resistance to the flow or if it presents so much resistance that there is no flow through it. At the same time, the estimation of exploitable resource should take into consideration the environmental, economic and social constraints. In view of these, the design of efficient turbines driven by bi-directional tidal currents has been a challenge to researchers for some time. There appears to be a general agreement among researchers that a number of turbines spread over the width of the channel can extract more energy compared to an isolated turbine. The present work is aimed at quantifying the improvement in the performance of a given type of turbine by utilizing a larger area of the channel. Numerical experiments were performed using the commercial CFD code ANSYS-CFX to study the performance of a bi-directional cross-flow turbine by simulating two cases of i) a single turbine and ii) a number of equally spaced turbines. It was found that the Coefficient of Power can be increased significantly by employing a larger area of the channel.