About | ECITTT | Conference Programme | Poster Abstracts (8.)

AERODYNAMIC DESIGN OF A WELLS-TURBINE-BLADE WITH CFD

A P Schaffarczyk and M Schrumpf
Laboratory of Computational Mechanics
Mech Eng Dept.
University of Applied Sciences Kiel
D-24149 Kiel, Germany
http://stheno.maschinenwesen.fh-kiel.de/~nummech
A small-scale Wells-Turbine like [1] was designed and a model was produced for a power-station on sea. Due to the special working principle [3] emphasis has to taken on the aerodynamic profile and blade design. No empirical relations are available for these types of profiles/blades, so CFD is the only tool to get information about performance and power. The blade was designed with SDRC-IDEAS, MS 7 to have direct access to a rapid prototyping machine as well as to the meshing tool ICEMCFD.

Results:

Common NACA 00tt profiles have bad performance.
Compared to full 3D Navier-Stokes-Simulation the simpler 2.5D actuator-disk model from [4] gives similar results for the swirl-velocity-distribution and outlet-flow-angle.

Outlook:
A 100 mm model was built but still has to be measured. For optimizing the Turbine [5] more recent developed symmetrical Eppler-Profiles [2] should investigated.

References:

R.A. Davey, CFD Simulation of the Wells Turbine, 5th int. CFX Users Conference, Friedrichshafen, June 1999
R. Eppler, Airfoil Design and DATA, J. Springer, Berlin, 1990
S. Raghunathan, C.P. Tan, N.A. Wells, Theory and Performance of a Wells Turbine, AIAA TN 6, pp 157-160, 1982
A.P. Schaffarczyk, Blattelementmethode via CFX (in german), CFD Lab. internal Report (14), Kiel, Feb. 2000
C.E. Tindall, Mingzhuo Xu, Optimizing a Wells-Turbine Wave Energy System, IEEE Trans. Energy Conv., pp 631-635, 1996