Evaluation of the Power Generation Capacity of Hydrokinetic Generator Device Using Computational Analysis and Hydrodynamic Similitude

Abstract

This paper presents a similitude and computational analysis of the performance of a scaled-down model of a paddle wheel style hydrokinetic generator device used for generating power from the flow of a river. The paddle wheel dimensions used in this work are one-thirtieth scale of the full-size paddle wheel. The reason for simulating the scaled-down model was to prepare for the testing of a scaled-down physical prototype. Computational Fluid Dynamics using ANSYS Fluent 14.0 software was used for the computational analysis. The scaled-down dimensions were used in the simulations to predict the power that can be generated from the scaled size model of the paddle wheel, having carried out similitude analysis between the scaled down size and its full-size. The dimensionless parameters employed in achieving similitude are the Strouhal number, power coefficient, and pressure coefficient. The power estimation of the full-size was predicted from the scaled size of the paddle wheel based on the similitude analysis.