MARINE ENERGY CROSS-FLOW TURBINES IN HIGH CONFINEMENT

Abstract

Marine renewable energy technology has recently garnered significant interest. Among the various technologies that extract usable power from fluid flows, cross-flow turbines (CFTs) are particularly well-suited for use in river and tidal channels. CFTs are advantageous due to their ability to operate with lower relative incoming fluid velocities, their insensitivity to flow direction, and their suitability for deployment in array configurations [5,8]. To improve the efficiency of CFTs, various strategies have been explored to augment power generation. Geometrical optimisations including blade shape [33], pitch angle variation, blade count [25, 27], varying chord to radius ratios [21, 22], various array configurations [5, 8, 14], or turbine control or operation strategies such as intracycle blade velocity control [30], active pitch control [12], and confinement exploitation [19, 20, 22]. This thesis focuses on exploring the subject of the augmentation of power generated via confinement exploitation.