International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research

IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

Performance Analysis of Darrieus Hydrokinetic Turbine

Vipin Kumar
Post Graduate Student,
Department of Mechanical Engg., IIT (ISM) Dhanbad.

Shibayan Sarkar
Assistant Professor,
Department of Mechanical Engg., IIT (ISM) Dhanbad

ABSTRACT
Energy is essential for socio-economic growth and development for a country. It is available in renewable and
nonrenewable forms. Water is one forms of renewable energy source which is utilized by various conversion methods.
Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine is one of the electromechanical devices which convert the kinetic energy of water into
electricity without creating the head and constructing dams. It utilizes the energy of river streams, tidal currents, and a
wave of water channels. The objective of this paper is to analyze the performance of the Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine
for power generation. For analysis performance, two Darrieus rotors which have three and four straight blades with
NACA 63-018 profiles are modeled and simulate the performance using CFX in ANSYS software. It is investigated that
three blades having solidity 0.18 has better performance compared to four blades having solidity 0.24.

KEYWORDS
Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine, performance parameter, Power coefficient, tip speed ratio.

1. INTRODUCTION
In the era of technology and growing population, the world is facing a significant increase in energy demand
which cannot be fulfilled by conventional means due to rising price and high pollution level. To meet this
energy supply, it is necessary to use renewable means of technologies. In area of renewable energy source
hydrokinetic turbine is one option which have better performance compared to wind turbine in terms of power
extraction, as the water is having higher specific weight and momentum compared to air, also as the velocity
of free stream water increases, torque and power increases as shown in Fig.1, but loading on the turbine blade
become constraint[1]. Initially, these turbines are installed for marine current in 2003 by Marine Current
Turbines (MCT) Ltd. and IT-Power whose capacity is to produce 300 KW [2].Herman Jacobus vermaak et al.
[3] investigated the research gap of micro-hydrodynamic river technology in rural areas and compare
environmental and techno-economic development for electrification option in rural areas. For evaluating the
performance of turbine performance coefficient has used which depends upon the velocity of current and
design of turbine. The water current velocity can be increased by- (i) Using turbine where the slope of the
slope of land under water is more (ii) Increasing the velocity of flow using duct or nozzle before the inlet of
the turbine.
In this work, modeling and analysis are carried out with a view to analyzing the performance of three blades
and four blades Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine, which can extract power from any source of flowing water. The
comparisons of rotors are also done so that the rotor having better performance can be obtained.

1160 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

Fig1: Comparison of power density for water stream and wind turbine [4]

2. RESEARCH MODEL
The research object is two Darrieus rotors having three blades and four blades of the NACA-63018 profile.
The chord length of the blade is taken to be 30mm. The diameter and height of rotor are 160 mm and 180 mm
respectively including top and a bottom plate having thickness 10 mm each. Rotational speed provided to the
rotor is 100 revolutions per minute in an anticlockwise direction in the fluid domain. The rotors are modeled
using Solid-Works software as shown in Fig.2

H
H

D
D

Fig 2: Three and four straight bladed Darrieus rotor

3. DATA REDUCTION
For analyzing the performance of straight bladed Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine following equations are used
and all parameters are calculated using these expressions from 1-8.

1: Coefficient of Power (cp)- It is defined as the ratio of output power (Pout) of the rotor to hydrokinetic power
input (Pin).

1161 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

Pout
Cp  (1)
Pin

And Pin  1    A  V 3
2 (2)
Where V is velocity of fluid stream at inlet of rotor, A is swept area and ρ is density of fluid.
2: Tip Speed Ratio (λ):- It represents rotor’s rotational speed (ω) having radius (r) against the velocity of
fluid V
λ=ω*r/V (3)
3: Solidity (σ)- It is defined as the ratio of total blade chord length to turbine circumference. The solidity of a
turbine with rotor diameter d, number of blades n and having c as the blade chord length is represented as

σ =(n*c)/πd (4)
4: Coefficient of torque (Ct) - It shows performance of turbine and defined as the ratio of Coefficient of
power to the tip speed ratio.
Ct=Cp/λ (5)
5: Aspect ratio (AR): Aspect ratio of a blade is the ratio of the height of rotor to blade chord length. It can be
defined as,
AR=h/c (6)
Where c is the chord length of the blade and h is the height of the turbine rotor
6: Angle of Attack (α)- It is the angle between the relative hydrofoil and the chord line of a hydrofoil. Lift
and drag data are generally available for the low angle of attacks ranging from 10ᶱ-200.
7: Blockage ratio (BR)- It is defined as the ratio of the area covered by the rotor of the turbine to the
projected flow area in the water channel.
BR = HD/ HwWw (7)
Where Hw = Height of water depth in the canal, Ww = width of the water canal

8: Lift Coefficient (CL) and Drag Coefficient (CD)- These two parameters depend on the profile of the
blade and Reynolds number. The lift coefficient, CL refers to the dynamic lift characteristics of a two-
dimensional foil section, CL is a function of the angle of the body to the flow and its Reynolds number. The
drag coefficient, CD is a dimensionless quantity that is used to quantify the drag or resistance of an object in a
fluid environment.
9: Reynolds Number (Re): Reynolds number shows overall flow pattern of fluid. Large Reynolds number
shows more turbulence. For a rotor diameter d, velocity V and υ as the kinematic viscosity of water, Re can be
expressed as
Re = (V*d)/ υ (8)

4. CONTROL EQUATIONS-
The flow in rivers and channels are in a turbulent manner so the equation of turbulent flow behavior governs
the performance of Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine.
The continuity equation of the flow is given as-

.V  0 (9)

DV 
  g  .P  . ij (10)
Dt

1162 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

 
ui u j 
 ij   (  )  ui'u 'j (11)
x j xi
 '
Where ui' and u j are the fluctuating velocities. The most commonly turbulent flow model is k-ε turbulent
model in which k represents turbulent kinetic energy and ε is the dissipation rate, which are evaluated by
equation (12) and (13).
1 '
k ui (12)
2


V ' ' T 2
( grad u i  grad u i ) (13)
2
The tip of water turbine rotor is moving at a faster rate compared to flow speed of water and the rotation of the
blade is due to the force acting on blade given by expression (14).
F =FL sinα - FDcosα = ρAW2(CLsinα- CD cosα) (14)
Where CL, CD are lift and drag coefficient and FL, FD are lift and drag force.

5.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

5.1 COMPUTATIONAL GRID-
The blades are of NACA profile and rotating so unconstructed tetrahedral grid is adopted for both the rotors.
The computational domain of three blades rotor consists of 105438 nodes and 583399 elements whereas four
blades rotor consists of 156664 nodes and 883704 elements. The quality of grids is satisfied with the solver’s
demand

Fig 3: Model of two blades and three blade having tetrahedral grids.

5.2 BOUNDARY CONDITIONS-

Following boundary conditions are set-up in CFX solver settings
i. Rotor domain is provided with 100 revolutions per minute in an anticlockwise direction.
ii. From the material library, water is taken as flowing fluid.
iii. At the inlet, different fluid velocities ranging from 0.8 m/sec to 2 m/sec is provided.
iv. Atmospheric pressure is provided at the outlet as well as a top open section of the channel.
v. At the fixed walls no-slip boundary conditions are specified.

1163 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

Fig 4: Arrangement of Turbines in computational Domain

5.3 VALIDATION AND THEORETICAL DISCUSSION

The results obtained from the numerical simulation of 3 blades having NACA 60-018 profile is validated from
experimental results published by Shiono et al. [9] at solidity 0.537.
Both results shown in Fig.5 describes that as the flow velocity increases the output power by the turbine also
increases, and giving the approximately same amount of power at respective velocity. In the experimental
result, maximum power obtained is 16.53 W at a flow speed of 1.4 m/s while the simulation result shows the
maximum power of 29 W at a flow speed of 2 m/s.

35
30
Computational
Power Output(W)

25
20 Experimental(Shiono et al.[9]
15
10
5
0
0.4 0.9 1.4 1.9 2.4
Flow velocity (m/s)

Fig 5: Comparision of output power Vs flow velocity in the experimental and computational analysis.

5.4 EFFECT OF NUMBER OF BLADES

Numerical simulation is done on both i.e three blade and four blade turbines at solidity 0.18 and 0.24
respectively. It may be observed that solidity is also the main factor which decides the performance of the
hydrokinetic turbine. As the number of blade increases from three to four the solidity also increases and the
power output of turbine decreases.
In contrast, with three bladed NACA 63-018 rotor, four blade NACA 63-018 rotor both indicates increasing
trend of power with flow velocity but maximum power decreases as solidity increases from 0.24 to 0.18 as
shown in fig 6.

1164 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

35
30
Power Output (W)

25
20
15 3 blade
10 4 blade
5
0
0.4 0.9 1.4 1.9 2.4
Flow Velocity (m/s)

Fig 6: Power output by three blades and four blade turbine at a different velocity.

5.5 EFFECT OF TIP SPEED RATIO.

From the numerical investigation, it is concluded that as the tip speed ratio increases the power coefficient
also increases and it reaches a maximum value of 0.54 for three blades and 0.5 for four blades at tip speed
ratio of 0.83, further increase in tip speed ratio the power coefficient decreases. As in most of the cases, the
higher value of the Cp is obtained at high tip speed ratio, the reason is, higher tip speed ratio arises at the
greater angular velocity (ω) of the rotor which enhances the relative velocity (W) of the water flow. Due to
higher velocity, Reynolds number also higher and the ratio of lift coefficient to drag is also enhances for a
specific angle of attack [10] which leads to enhancing the tangential force coefficient and torque. Hence, the
chances to get higher Cp will enhance at high tip speed ratio. However, after a certain velocity, the ratio of lift
to drag coefficient falls [10] in some hydrofoils, which might lead to falling in power coefficient.

0.6
3 blade
4 blade
0.5
Power Coefficient(Cp)

0.4

0.3

0.2
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
Tip speed Ratio (λ)

Fig 7: Power coefficient at a different tip speed ratio

1165 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
www.ijetsr.com
ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

5.6 VELOCITY AND PRESSURE DISTRIBUTION

According to above-given boundary conditions simulations are done. A plane is taken in the domain at 80 mm
from the bottom, the velocity distributions are obtained at 2 m/s for three blades and 0.8 m/s for four blades
Darrieus rotor turbine as shown in Fig.8. It is observed that accelerated velocity is around the rotating domain
of rotor.

Fig 8: Velocity distribution in region of three blade and four blade

The pressure distributions are also obtained around a flow field of the rotor at maximum velocity 2 m/s for
three blade rotor and 0.8 m/s for the four-blade rotor.The distribution is shown in fig.9.

Fig 9: Velocity distribution in the region of three blades and four blades rotor

6 CONCLUSION
The important characteristics which indicate the performance of Darrieus hydrokinetic turbine are solidity,
number of blades, flow velocity and tip speed ratio. From numerical investigation following conclusion can be
made-
 Three blade NACA 63-018 profile have better performance compared to four blades NACA-63-018
profile.
 As the flow velocity increases the output power by turbine increases.

1166 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar

 International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research
IJETSR
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ISSN 2394 – 3386
Volume 5, Issue 3
March 2018

 The maximum power coefficient region lies in higher tip speed ratio region.
 Starting torque required in the straight blade darrieus hydrokinetic turbine is more.
If the darrieus hydrokinetic turbine is used for power generation through rivers or tidal source three-blade
rotor is a more appropriate option, however, the effect of turbulence is not considered so further studies
concerning this issue can be pursued.

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[9] Shiono, Mitsuhiro, Katsuyuki Suzuki, and Seiji Kiho. "An experimental study of the characteristics of a Darrieus
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[10] S.M. Aranda, A.L.G. González, L. Parras, J.F. Velázquez-Navarro, C. Pino, Comparison of the aerodynamic
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1167 Vipin Kumar, Shibayan Sarkar