Experimental characterization of the unsteady performance behavior of a Wells turbine operating at high flow rate coefficients

¹ Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management, Polytechnic University of Bari, 70125 Bari, Italy
² Department of Civil, Energy, Environment and Materials Engineering, Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, 89124 Reggio Calabria, Italy

^* e-mail: marco.torresi@poliba.it

Abstract

Even if researchers are working on the exploitation of marine energy for more than thirty years, blue energy is not yet a consolidated reality and still contributes marginally to the world energy mix. For this reason, in the last years, the effort of the scientific community has been significantly intensified to further improve the know-how on marine energy harvesting. The goal is to allow ocean energy to effectively contribute to a more sustainable energy production in the next future. In the wide range of technologies for wave energy harvesting, Oscillating Water Column (OWC) devices are counted among of the most mature ones. Due to the oscillating nature of the generated air flow, which continuously inverts its direction, OWC devices need to be coupled with self-rectifying turbines, such as Wells, impulse, or biradial turbines. Wells turbines can reach high efficiencies, but their performance can show a hysteretic behaviour due to dynamic stall phenomena, especially in presence of high amplitude flow rate oscillations. Moreover, under dynamic stall conditions, during the flow deceleration, the shaft torque evidence the presence of gradually damped fluctuations, which delay the flow reattachment, superposed to the hysteresys loop. In order to better characterize this phenomenon, a new experimental campaign was performed in the open wind tunnel of the Polytechnic University of Bari on a 3D-printed Wells turbine model. The interest is mainly focused on the dependency of these torque fluctuations on the amplitude and frequency of the oscillating flow.