A marine propeller as a hydrokinetic turbine - CFD analysis of energy characteristics

Abstract

It is sometimes economically unreasonable to develop specific turbines, but rather to use a well-known concept of a pump in the turbine mode - PAT (Pump As Turbine). Inspired by PAT, the scope of this paper covers the assessments of the possibility to use marine propellers as runners for the hydrokinetic turbines. Numerical analyses are conducted for selected propeller geometry with the aim of evaluating its energy characteristics in the turbine regime. The chosen propeller belongs to the conventional, thoroughly experimentally tested, Wageningen B -screw series. The experimental data were used for validation of the numerical results in propeller regimes. Based on the obtained results, the researched non-optimized turbine in its optimum regime achieves a satisfactory power coefficient which is close to the value of other types of contemporary hydrokinetic turbines efficiencies.