A twin unidirectional impulse turbine has been proposed in order to enhance the performance of wave energy plant. This turbine system uses two unidirectional impulse turbines and their flow direction is different each other. However, the turbine characteristics have not been clarified to date. The performances of a unidirectional impulse turbine under steady flow conditions were investigated experimentally by using a wind tunnel with large piston/cylinder in this study. Copyright © 2011 by ASME.

V. Jayashankar

Experimental studies

FLOW CONDITION

Flow direction

IMPULSE TURBINES

TURBINE SYSTEMS

Wave energy

WAVE ENERGY CONVERSION

Hydraulic turbines

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

ASME-JSME-KSME 2011 Joint Fluids Engineering Conference, AJK 2011

Experimental results from near shore bottom standing OWC based wave energy plants in Japan and India have now been available for about a decade. Historically the weakest link in the conversion efficiency of OWC based wave energy plants built so far has been the bidirectional turbine. This is possibly because a single turbine has been required to deliver power when the plant is exposed to random incident wave excitation varying by a factor of 10. A new topology that uses twin unidirectional turbines (which features a high efficiency spanning a broad range) is proposed. Using the Indian Wave Energy plant as a case study, it is shown that the power output from such a module considerably exceeds existing optimal configurations including those based on a fixed guide vane impulse turbine, linked guide vane impulse turbine or a Well's turbine. A wave to wire efficiency of the order of 50% over the incident range is shown to be feasible in a credible manner by showing the output at all stages of the conversion process. A frequency domain technique is used to compute the OWC efficiency and a time domain approach used for the power module with the turbine pressure being the pivotal variable. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Renewable Energy

A twin unidirectional impulse turbine topology for OWC based wave energy plants

Progress in Aerospace Sciences

The wells air turbine for wave energy conversion

Experimental study on a twin unidirectional impulse turbine for wave energy conversion

Journal	ASME-JSME-KSME 2011 Joint Fluids Engineering Conference, AJK 2011
Open Access	No