Abstract
The tidal current turbine is an innovative and emerging technology of marine renewable energies because it provides a steady and predictable energy source that can be extracted and used for commercial power generation. In this paper, the largest megawatt-scale horizontal axis tidal turbine (HATT) unit in China was designed and manufactured by LHD. The performance of this HATT was studied in detail, including numerical simulation, experiment and sea trial research. The hub is then used as an example to show how to analyze the strength and fatigue life of HATT parts under various working situations. This article aims to outline the design and research process for a big MW-scale HATT as well as the reliability check procedure for a HATT's essential parts. Results show that a good agreement has been obtained between the CFD predictions and the experiment data, moreover, the HATT has a great power output performance. Through the analysis of the strength and fatigue life of the hub under different working conditions, the results show that the hub has good reliability and life, which can reach 20 years of working life. And the analysis method can be directly applied to the reliability check of other parts. Finally, the research of this paper is expected to provide a reference for large-scale commercial implementation of a HATT.