CFD Analysis of a Water Flume Design for Testing Marine and Hydrokinetics Energy Converters

Marine and hydrokinetic (MHK) energy resources with advantages such as predictability and less variability compared to other forms of renewable energies, have been drawing more interest in recent years. One important phase before commercialization of new MHK technologies is to conduct experimental testing and evaluate their performance in a real environment. In this work, a numerical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is used to study the fluid flow behavior within a designed water flume for MHK energy technologies. The water flume design parameters were given by the team collaborators at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Colorado School of Mines. The results from this simulation showed the flow characteristics within the test-section of the proposed water flume design. These results can be used for the follow on phases of this research that includes testing scaled MHK prototypes at different flow rates as well as optimizing either the water flume design to obtain more realistic flow characteristics within the test section or the MHK devices to obtain higher performance metrics at lower cost.