A Design of 10 kW Class Counter-Rotating Tidal Turbine Focusing on the Improvement of Operating Performance

Tidal turbine, which is relatively similar to wind turbine in term of operational principle, has become a potential solution for the sustainable development of global energy. This paper introduces author’s work on tidal turbine which aims to improve the power efficiency by the adaption of counter-rotating concept. The turbine system is modelled and analyzed using computational simulation commercial code. Compared with other works, the counter-rotating tidal turbine presented here is expected to operate stably with high performance throughout a wide range of tip-speed-ratio. Moreover, the equability of individual performance of each rotor is an advantage.