Author(s): Philipp Daus; Andreas Ruopp; Frank Biskup; Raphael Arlitt
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Tidal Current Turbines; Tidal Simulation; Performance Assessment; Tidal Energy
Abstract: The magnitude of energy, which is extracted by tidal energy converter devices, has a significant impact on the commercial viability of an entire project. Therefore a substantial characterization of the tidal current at the location of interest and subsequently a confident prediction of the electricity production of the tidal energy converter at an early stage of the project is of high interest. This paper deals with a method to estimate the production of a single device using results from a 2D shallow water equation model combined with turbine performance curves and its validation by performance data from operations of the Voith prototype Hy Tide 110-5. 3 under real conditions in Jindo, South Korea. A recently developed 2D shallow water equation solver based on Open FOAM (tidal Foam) is used to accurately simulate the tidal current around the installation location of the device. High-resolved bathymetry data, shorelines and tidal elevation at the open boundaries of the unstructured mesh is used to set up the model. The bottom friction as an additional implicit source term in the model is used to calibrate the simulation against Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) measurements at site. The expected electricity production is compared with actual field measurements during the operation of the Voith scaled demonstrator. The complete analysis and results gives valuable and significant confidence in the performance expectation of the single tidal turbine. The results show that the production of single devices can be accurately estimated. This grants an important first input to commercial evaluations of future tidal energy projects.
Year: 2014