Numerical Study of the Effect of Tip-speed Ratio on Hydrokinetic Turbine Wake Recovery

Elfajri, O., Bowman, J. L., Bhushan, S., Thompson, D., & O'Doherty, T. (2022). Numerical Study of the Effect of Tip-speed Ratio on Hydrokinetic Turbine Wake Recovery. Renewable Energy. 182, 725-750. DOI:10.1016/j.renene.2021.10.030.

The predictive capabilities of blade-resolved unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) and detached eddy simulation (DES), the most commonly used hybrid RANS/large eddy simulation (LES) model, are assessed for hydrokinetic turbine performance and mean and turbulent flows in the intermediate-wake region, and results for a range of tip-speed ratio encompassing design and off-design conditions are analyzed to understand the wake recovery mechanism. The performance predictions compared within 5% of the experimental data. Both URANS and DES models performed reasonably well for the near wake predictions, where the errors were