Investigation of Impulse Air Turbine for Wave Energy Conversion

Abstract

This paper describes the analysis of the impulse air turbine with fixed guide vanes, a high performance bi-directional air turbine having simple structure for wave energy conversion. A 2-dimensional incompressible viscous flow numerical analysis based on the full Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations was done to investigate the internal flow behavior. Numerical results are compared with experiments. As a result, a suitable choice of design factor has been clarified with the understanding of the internal flow from the experiments and numerical analysis.