A Study on the Effects of Flow Conditions on the Structural Behavior of a Tidal Turbine using FSI Analysis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In general CFD simulations for hydro-turbine performance evaluation, the turbine blades are usually considered rigid bodies, and their hydro-elastic behavior is ignored. Nonetheless, under the impacts of hydrodynamic loads of the fluid, the turbine blades are actually suffered from stress and strain, hence the deflection occurs during operation. In this study, the effects of various flow conditions on the structure of a propeller turbine are investigated with fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations. Because the predicted deformation of the turbine blades is relatively tiny and the via versa impacts of this deformation on the flow characteristics are negligible, the one-way FSI analysis is employed. The turbine blades’ structural behavior is evaluated under three different flow rates, including Q_d, 1.4Q_d, and 2Q_d. The results indicate that the double intensity of incoming flow causes 5.5 times the magnitude of blade deflection. Besides, the maximal stress for the designed flow is only 9.3 MPa, this feature rockets to 3 times that value for 1.4Q_d and reaches the highest result for 2Q_d, comprising 68 MPa.