Abstract
Tidal energy has clear potential in producing large amounts of energy as the world’s capacity exceeds 120 GW. Despite being one of the oldest renewable energy sources exploited by man, the technology is still in its pre-commercialisation stage and so lags behind other renewable sources such as wind and geothermal energy in terms of development and energy produced. One of the emerging energy extraction technologies in the tidal energy field is the Horizontal Axis Hydrokinetic Turbine (HAHT) which harness tidal stream energy the same way Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) extract energy from the wind. While HAHT has been the topic of many researches over the past decade, design of hydrofoils plays a vital role in increasing the structural strength of the blade and maximizing the output of the marine current turbines. In this context, a numerical investigation is conducted in this research in which new hydrofoil for marine current turbines underwater conditions was designed and evaluated. The turbine blade is designed using XFLR5 code and QBlade which is a Blade-Element Momentum solver with a blade design feature. Then, the hydrodynamic performance of hydrofoil was tested using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) consisting of lift and drag coefficients, and velocities distribution. The results showed that the new design of the hydrofoil of marine current turbine blade maintained a CPower value of 50% more from normal range at the TSR 5 to 9 and 51% more at TSR = 6,5 in the performance curve.