The evolution of turbulence characteristics in the wake of a horizontal axis tidal stream turbine

Abstract The evolution of turbulence characteristics downstream of a laboratory-scale three-bladed horizontal axis turbine is investigated in this study. Large eddy simulation (LES) coupled with the Actuator Line Modelling (ALM) is used to simulate the flow. The numerical results compare well against experimental data, which shows that the LES/ALM technique is a powerful tool for simulating tidal stream turbines. The present study aims to obtain a better understanding of the turbulence characteristics of flow in the turbine wake by removing deterministic velocity fluctuations stemmed from the turbine rotation. Large eddy simulation is able to provide high-resolution spatial and temporal information needed for this work. The filtering process helps to have a clearer view of the flow structures downstream by tracking the streamwise variations of turbulence intensity and turbulent kinetic energy and, reveals a transition zone started shortly behind the turbine with a peak in the turbulence intensity. This study introduces turbulence intensity and turbulent kinetic energy as quantitative criteria to split the turbine wake into distinct regions. This research shows that to investigate and explain the influence of different upstream and operation conditions on the flow characteristics in the turbine wake, a well understanding of flow characteristic changes in the transition zone is necessary.

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